admin GQ Hype: It’s the big story of right now.
Josh O’Connor was driving his yellow camper van through the Italian countryside, finally heading home. The British actor had been living in the van for three months while filming La Chimera, a period drama about grave robbers, in the hills of Bolsena. In the two hectic years since he had left London, O’Connor had won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance as Prince Charles in The Crown, and shot two films, bouncing between the US, Italy, the US, and Italy again. He had been playing other people for so long that he felt exhausted, the kind of tired where it is as though you are already asleep, and drifting on is somehow a less daunting prospect than trying to slow down.
The route was an 1,100-mile drive, curling northwest across the Alps and up through Europe to England. On the way, O’Connor received a text from his parents: “Make sure you top up on fuel before you get to northern France.” Weird, he thought, but this was typical of his folks, fellow #vanlife enthusiasts, who are always giving him this kind of highly specific yet context-free advice. “Like, what does that even mean?” he says now. “So, I just ignored it.”
Which is why, cruising down a French highway with his fuel gauge low, O’Connor wasn’t worried when he spotted a commotion at an unusually crowded gas station. “There was a queue coming out of it,” he says. “And I thought, Those idiots, what’s so special about that one?”
He drove on to the next station, which was empty. There, a quick Google informed him there was a shortage of fuel in the region due to strike action, leaving many stations without gas. (The subtext being: Always listen to your parents.) At this point, O’Connor did what any homesick, exhausted person would: He floored it, carefully ignoring the fuel-warning light now blazing like a naked flame in the corner of his eye.
But the van, which O’Connor calls Winnie (the family he’d bought it off had named it Winston, but O’Connor got a more feminine vibe), wasn’t having it. Before long O’Connor had to pull into a sleepy town, where the engine promptly cut out. A stranger helped him freewheel the van into a gas station. With the pumps empty, O’Connor shut his eyes. At 3 a.m. he was awoken by a knock on the driver’s door. There was fuel; people were partying at the pumps. “I filled up the entire tank and drove through the night in bliss,” he says.
The joy was short-lived. As O’Connor neared the Channel crossing, Winnie sputtered again and juddered to an excruciating halt. It took French mechanics a week to repair the problem, during which O’Connor was stranded in northern France. Finally, with Winnie fixed and O’Connor ready to conclude his journey, his phone rang with a call from Italy.
