[Source: AP]

The first thing Kelly Reichardt saw Josh O’Connor in was his 2017 breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country,” in which he played the sheep farmer Johnny Saxby.

“The next thing I knew of him was ‘The Crown,’ but I didn’t really realize it was the same actor. Then I got hip to that,” Reichardt says. “I thought he had a kind of timeless face.”

This fall, that face is everywhere. O’Connor stars in four films, including the New England romance “The History of Sound,” with Paul Mescal; “Rebuilding,” in which he plays a Colorado rancher whose home is taken by wildfires; Rian Johnson’s whodunit “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”; and Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” a 1970-set heist movie.

It’s a convergence of wide-ranging movies that showcase O’Connor’s rangy talent and innate, scruffy soulfulness. If “La Chimera” or “Challengers” didn’t already convince you, this season should be a veritable onslaught of O’Connor’s loose leading-man magnetism. Even among the star-studded ensemble of “Wake Up Deadman,” he’s the standout.

But “The Mastermind,” which opens in theaters Friday, may be the purest distillation of O’Connor’s singular screen presence. Reichardt, the filmmaker of “First Cow” and “Showing Up,” is a writer-director who gives her actors room to breathe.

In “The Mastermind,” O’Connor plays a suburban father named James Blaine Mooney, J.B. for short. In a haphazard act of delusional self-confidence, he steals several paintings from his local, lightly guarded museum, in Framingham, Massachusetts.

It’s Reichardt’s version of a heist movie, but one carried out with a granular rigor that the 35-year-old O’Connor — a longtime fan of the director — was drawn to. One of the lengthiest scenes in “The Mastermind” isn’t the heist, but J.B. struggling to hide the stolen paintings in a treehouse.

“If you’re seen Kelly’s movies, you know that Kelly is not overly concerned with cutting,” says O’Connor in an interview alongside Reichardt.

“Our eyes are used to someone going up a ladder and putting a painting away, cut to the final painting and he’s a bit out of breath. But if we’re not going to cinema to be observational, I don’t know what the point is.”

Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.