Oliver Jackson-Cohen is most useful when a film needs a man who is felt before he is seen, and most affecting when Mike Flanagan lets him show the hurt underneath the threat. Thrillers since have mostly booked the threat.
Fi1m perspective
For most of The Invisible Man (2020) Oliver Jackson-Cohen is not there. Adrian Griffin is a shape in an empty corner, a name in other people's mouths, and the film's best hour is spent watching Elisabeth Moss react to a man we cannot see. It is a strange thing to ask of an actor and he does it well: everyone on screen talks about Adrian the way you talk about weather that is on its way, and in the little time he is given he plays the man as calm and reasonable, which is worse. That is roughly his trade. He plays men whose damage arrives before they do.
The career took a while to find that. He started at fifteen in Hollyoaks (2002), moved through Lark Rise to Candleford (2008) and Mr Selfridge, and spent a few years in American supporting parts, Going the Distance (2010), Faster (2010), What's Your Number? (2011), that nobody much noticed and nobody much minded. Jonathan Harker in Dracula (2013) and the lead in the Australian miniseries The Secret River (2015) were better uses of him. Then Mike Flanagan cast him as Luke Crain in The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and the outline of the actor became clear.
Flanagan is the director who has got the most out of him, twice, with Peter Quint in The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) following. Hill House is a family drama first and a ghost story second, and Jackson-Cohen's Luke is where the two meet: the sibling whose addiction the others talk around, played with his shoulders in and an apology in his face before he has said a word. In the middle episodes we found him harder to watch than the ghosts. A man trying to hold himself together in a room full of people who love him and do not trust him is a more ordinary horror than a figure at the end of a corridor, and he never asks for our sympathy while he earns it. Leigh Whannell then turned that vulnerability inside out for Adrian, and it worked partly because we had seen the other side of it.
Since then the work has been steady and the roles have narrowed. Supporting parts in The Lost Daughter (2021) and Emily (2022) put him in serious company. The leads in the series Surface (2022–) and Wilderness (2023) drew mixed notices, with his performances generally spared. He has become the man producers ring when a thriller needs a husband the audience should not quite believe, and he could do it for the rest of his career without anyone complaining, which is the worry.
Our advice is Flanagan first. Hill House shows what he can do when a script lets the hurt and the menace sit in the same man; The Invisible Man shows how much he can do while off screen. The next interesting step is for somebody to cast him as the one who gets hurt rather than the one who does the hurting, and to keep his face in the frame for the whole running time.
Biography
Oliver Mansour Jackson-Cohen (born 24 October 1986) is an English actor. He is known for his role as Luke Crain in the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and as Peter Quint in The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), as well as for playing Adrian Griffin in the film The Invisible Man (2020).
Jackson-Cohen was born in London to fashion designer Betty Jackson and David Cohen. He attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle and the Youngblood Theatre Company, later studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York. His early television roles include appearances in Lark Rise to Candleford (2008) and Dracula (2013). Other credits include Going the Distance (2010), Faster (2010) and The Lost Daughter (2021).
