Whenever Josh O’Connor is onscreen in Challengers, he’s a cocky charmer, confident in his power (and his sexual prowess) even at his lowest. It’s a far cry from the role most people in the U.S. know him for — The Crown’s Prince Charles — but it’s not too distant from the role people should know him for: The Durrells in Corfu’s Larry.
Airing from 2016-2019, The Durrells in Corfu (or The Durrells, as it’s known in Europe) is an ITV period drama with swagger. It made its way to the States as part of PBS’s Masterpiece line-up, which might make you think it’s sedate and sexless. In reality, it’s anything but. The story of a British family’s stint on a Greek isle in the 1930s, The Durrells in Corfu is based on the real-life writings of the quintet’s youngest son, Gerry, who’d go on to become a rather famous naturalist.
As far as British period dramas go, The Durrells has everything you’d want in spades: beautiful locales, mostly whimsical material, handsome middle-aged men, and actors you vaguely know from other British period 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 author who spends much of his time banging away on a typewriter and screaming. He’s his widowed mother’s confidant and, eventually, one of the financially struggling family’s biggest saviors after his debut novel becomes a hit with continental readers, who don’t mind its smutty stanzas. Larry is hedonism personified, guzzling bottles of wine and taking up with the family’s sexily menacing landlady, and he’s also the show’s most over-the-top comic relief, going through at least three overwrought illnesses during the show’s four-season run, including the mumps, which O’Connor plays to maximum comic effect.
But Larry can be thoughtful, too, helping his mother navigate the ups and downs of her slow-burning love affair with the suave and congenial local cab driver 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 most part, are wonderfully batty and wholly self-absorbed. Larry is his family’s conscience, advocating for the free press and taking up the cause of Sven, a Swedish, goat-farming neighbor who is, at one point earlier in the series, engaged to Mrs. Durrell until it’s quietly revealed that he’s actually gay. He’s also the family’s biggest ear to the ground amidst the rise of the Nazis in Europe, pushing the family to return to England at the series’ end even while remaining in Greece himself to act as some sort of spy.
In real life, Larry Durrell was a less savory character than O’Connor is onscreen, running through multiple tumultuous marriages and allegations of a deeply disturbing relationship with his daughter Sappho. If you can push past that — and it’s tough, we know — and just see the Larry onscreen as a comedic fool, O’Connor’s portrayal takes on an almost Shakespearean quality, the larger-than-life jester who sees all and knows all, even if he’s rarely the one to make it right.
That’s not too dissimilar from O’Connor’s Challengers character, Patrick Zweig, who seems to see the world with a sort of transactional clarity, whether that means sweet-talking a pro-shop worker for half a bagel sandwich or cutting to the core of Tashi Duncan’s psychosexual machinations. Both Patrick and Larry see the world as it is — or at least as how they would will it to be — and it’s through them that O’Connor is able to deliver his best work, reminding not just the characters onscreen but the audience at home of how full life can truly be if we can just let ourselves be free.
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