‘Constellation’ star James D’Arcy on his ‘Oppenheimer’ Oscar hopes — and ‘telepathic’ co-star
He’s going from the atomic bomb to an outer space thriller.
“Oppenheimer” actor James D’Arcy co-stars in “Constellation” (Apple TV+), which follows an astronaut who returns home from space — only to find her reality seemingly changed.
“I found it a really unique piece of writing,” D’Arcy, 48, told The Post.
“It seems to me to defy easy comparison, which I liked enormously about it. I liked that I couldn’t even pin down what genre it was,” he said. “Because it seemed initially to be a sci-fi [show], and then it felt like a thriller. But actually it was a domestic drama, and then there was a conspiracy theory element to it all.
“And in the end, now that I’ve had time to really think about it, what I think it is is an excitingly paced meditation on the nature of reality.”
Now streaming (with new episodes out on Wednesdays) “Constellation” follows astronaut Jo Ericsson (Noomi Rapace, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”), who is married to Magnus (D’Arcy); the couple share a daughter, Alice (played by twins Rosie and Davina Coleman).
Jo, alone on the international space station after a catastrophe, makes a harrowing and strange return home — but there, she finds that her life isn’t as she remembered it.
There are odd inconsistencies: her car is a different color than it was before she left, and her marriage to Magnus seems ruined, but she has no recollection of what led to that development. Before going into space, Alice spoke both English and Swedish — but now she only seems to speak English.
Jonathan Banks (“Breaking Bad”) co-stars as a scientist with slippery motives.
“For me, because our world was so upended in 2020, and everything that we thought was stable — leaving our houses, and simple things — suddenly wasn’t stable, I feel like a lot of people have been wrestling with what exactly is real,” D’Arcy said.
“I love that our show dealt with it through the eyes of a family unit breaking down, put into a very extreme situation,” said D’Arcy.
D’Arcy said that art imitated life, since “Constellation” has an eerie subject matter, and behind the scenes, there seemed to be something supernatural at play with twins Rosie and Davina Coleman, who played his daughter, Alice.
“What was amazing was, I’d be doing a scene, let’s say, with Davina. And she would improvise something, like she’d reach out and touch my arm, in the scene. Then, they’d have to change the girls over before the scene was finished. And now, I’d be working with Rosie … And she’d touch my arm, at the same time. This happened so many times. I’d say, ‘Oh, did you girls talk? You discussed to touch my arm there?’ They’d look at me and go, ‘No, I just thought it was the right thing to do in that moment.’ It’s kind of amazing, it’s an incredible thing that those two girls had some kind of telepathic communication, or something.”
D’Arcy, who plays Patrick Blackett in “Oppenheimer,” added that he won’t be at the Oscars March 10 — where “Oppenheimer” could take home several Academy Awards — but “I feel very happy that ‘Oppenheimer’ will be extremely well represented,” he said.
“And I hope that my castmates and director and everybody else who has been nominated win.”
