In the past two years, Jack O’Connell has played a vampire in “Sinners” and a cult leader in the “28 Years Later” films. But to take on the role of tabloid editor Larry Lamb, he got even more comfortable with suave, alluring menace. “His prerogative is very simple,” O’Connell says over Zoom from London. “He’s fixated on sales numbers and whatever it’s going to take to keep that figure rising. He’ll stop at nothing — and that means bending the rules. It was very naughty.” Netflix’s “Ink,” directed by Danny Boyle and set to open the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2, is as naughty as its central character. Lamb was the real-life editor of The Sun who — hired in 1969 by press baron Rupert Murdoch to help the tabloid break into the U.K. newspaper industry — pioneered such practices as publishing nude pictures of “Page 3 Girls.”
He also had a knack for framing stories as lurid, sexy or gleefully partisan, all to tickle readers’ resentments and libidos. In taking Murdoch’s dark vision of the world and turning it into can’t-look-away media, Lamb was Fox News’ Roger Ailes before Roger Ailes. “There’s something very seductive about these sins they’re packaging up and selling,” O’Connell says. “That’s capitalism, isn’t it?”
