Before Challengers, Josh O’Connor Served Sex and Swagger in a Masterpiece Series

Whenever Josh O’Connor is onscreen successful Challengers, he’s a cocky charmer, assured successful his powerfulness (and his intersexual prowess) adjacent astatine his lowest. It’s a acold outcry from the relation astir radical successful the U.S. cognize him for — The Crown’s Prince Charles — but it’s not excessively distant from the relation radical should know him for: The Durrells successful Corfu’s Larry. 

Airing from 2016-2019, The Durrells successful Corfu (or The Durrells, arsenic it’s known successful Europe) is an ITV play play with swagger. It made its mode to the States arsenic portion of PBS’s Masterpiece line-up, which mightiness marque you deliberation it’s sedate and sexless. In reality, it’s thing but. The communicative of a British family’s stint connected a Greek isle successful the 1930s, The Durrells successful Corfu is based connected the real-life writings of the quintet’s youngest son, Gerry, who’d spell connected to go a alternatively celebrated naturalist.

As acold arsenic British play dramas go, The Durrells has everything you’d privation successful spades: beauteous locales, mostly whimsical material, handsome middle-aged men, and actors you vaguely cognize from different British play pieces, including All Creatures Great And Small’s Callum Woodhouse and Keely Hawes of Bodyguard and being-married-to–Matthew Macfadyen fame.

As Larry, O’Connor plays the family’s oldest child, a self-possessed, sex-crazed writer who spends overmuch of his clip banging distant connected a typewriter and screaming. He’s his widowed mother’s confidant and, eventually, 1 of the financially struggling family’s biggest saviors aft his debut caller becomes a deed with continental readers, who don’t caput its smutty stanzas. Larry is hedonism personified, guzzling bottles of vino and taking up with the family’s sexily menacing landlady, and he’s besides the show’s astir over-the-top comic relief, going done astatine slightest 3 overwrought illnesses during the show’s four-season run, including the mumps, which O’Connor plays to maximum comic effect.

But Larry tin beryllium thoughtful, too, helping his parent navigate the ups and downs of her slow-burning emotion matter with the suave and congenial section cab operator Spiros Halikiopoulos (played beautifully by Greek actor/politician Alexis Georgoulis) and delivering the occasional well-meant compliment to his younger siblings Margo, Leslie, and Gerry, who, for the astir part, are wonderfully batty and wholly self-absorbed. Larry is his family’s conscience, advocating for the escaped property and taking up the origin of Sven, a Swedish, goat-farming neighbour who is, astatine 1 constituent earlier successful the series, engaged to Mrs. Durrell until it’s softly revealed that he’s really gay. He’s besides the family’s biggest receptor to the crushed amidst the emergence of the Nazis successful Europe, pushing the household to instrumentality to England astatine the series’ extremity adjacent portion remaining successful Greece himself to enactment arsenic immoderate benignant of spy.

In existent life, Larry Durrell was a little savory quality than O’Connor is onscreen, moving done aggregate tumultuous marriages and allegations of a profoundly disturbing relationship with his girl Sappho. If you tin propulsion past that — and it’s tough, we cognize — and conscionable spot the Larry onscreen arsenic a comedic fool, O’Connor’s portrayal takes connected an astir Shakespearean quality, the larger-than-life jester who sees each and knows all, adjacent if he’s seldom the 1 to marque it right.

That’s not excessively dissimilar from O’Connor’s Challengers character, Patrick Zweig, who seems to spot the satellite with a benignant of transactional clarity, whether that means sweet-talking a pro-shop idiosyncratic for fractional a bagel sandwich oregon cutting to the halfway of Tashi Duncan’s psychosexual machinations. Both Patrick and Larry spot the satellite arsenic it is — oregon astatine slightest arsenic however they would volition it to beryllium — and it’s done them that O’Connor is capable to present his champion work, reminding not conscionable the characters onscreen but the assemblage astatine location of however afloat beingness tin genuinely beryllium if we tin conscionable fto ourselves beryllium free.