The Crown star Josh O’Connor has revealed that he tried to woo singer-songwriter FKA Twigs when they were at school together.
Josh and Twigs both attended St Edward’s School in Cheltenham, and while they were teenagers, performed together in a production of Bugsy Malone.
Around this time, the future Emmy winner formed a group with his classmates in what he’s now admitted was largely an attempt to catch Twigs’ attention.
“I really shouldn’t be saying this, but it’s hilarious,” he told GQ Hype in an interview conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strikes got underway.
“I was in a band called Orange Output basically to try and get Twigs to go out with me.”
He continued: “I was the lead singer, and one of the lyrics I wrote was ‘I’m addicted to crack, motherf***er’. The closest thing I’d had to crack was Coco Pops.”
While Josh concluded that he doesn’t think Twigs “knows who I am”, it turns out he was mistaken.
The Cellophane singer told GQ Hype in response to Josh’s story: “I’m very flattered that he tried to do that because I was definitely not cool and not particularly popular.”
Josh played a young King Charles in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown, which earned him both an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
He added to the magazine that while the royal Netflix drama may have boosted his profile, this wasn’t without its pitfalls.
“It was a f***ed-up time,” Josh admitted. “I found it so impactful, people stopping me. You want to be in stuff that’s successful and seen, but I think sometimes we underestimate how powerful even a slight loss of anonymity can be.”
Josh is currently gearing up for the debut of his latest film Challengers, in which he shares the screen with Zendaya, although the project’s release date has been pushed back as a result of the Hollywood strikes.
“What I was doing in my career before The Crown – I just wanted to carry on doing that,” he explained.
Read Josh O’Connor’s interview in full online at GQ Hype now.