Callum Turner on Those James Bond Rumors, Life With Dua Lipa and Starring in the Summer’s Biggest Rom-Com

Hollywood’s new “It” Brit is suddenly on everyone’s list. (Just ask Clooney.) But does he have the juice to become the next leading man?

These days, George Clooney finds himself often thinking about how modern movie stars are made. “Speaking as an older guy now, it’s interesting how much more difficult it is than it was back in the day,” the 65-year-old Oscar winner says. He has some theories as to why: the changing shape of the roles, the loss of the security studios used to offer younger talent, the land mine that is social media. “It’s just harder,” he concedes. “Talk to any big-time producer or big-time director: They’re constantly going, ‘Who’s a leading man now? Who’s the one?’ “

To those asking, good news: Clooney has a name for you. Boasting everyman appeal and impossibly broad shoulders, Callum Turner played the lead in Clooney’s 2023 historical drama film, The Boys in the Boat — and in the years since, the director has only felt more convinced that Turner’s got it. “He hasn’t just gone for the easy paychecks — he’s done really interesting work,” Clooney says. “Somehow Callum has weaved his way through all of the noise and found a place where people look at him and go, ‘There’s something with this young man.’ It’s exciting to watch people saying, ‘That guy — that’s a guy I want to follow and pay attention to.’ “

Turner, now 36, has experienced steady growth in the industry since he started acting in his early 20s. The London native made an impression in well-received indies like Jeremy Saulnier’s tense thriller Green Room and the smart New York romance Tramps. He jumped into the $1.86 billion-grossing Fantastic Beasts series as Eddie Redmayne’s war veteran older brother. The month after Boys in the Boat came out, he toplined Apple TV’s blockbuster miniseries Masters of the Air alongside Austin Butler, who’d been newly catapulted by Elvis.

We’re now entering a pivotal summer for Turner. Two art house passion projects will soon land in theaters — the starkly innovative Rose of Nevada, out June 19, and the polarizing satire Rosebush Pruning, bowing in July — before he faces his most significant test to date in August: leading the studio-backed, handsomely mounted rom-com One Night Only opposite Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown) and helmed by a master of the genre in Will Gluck.

This signals an inflection point. Turner has led commercial hits and daring indies but firmly within the lane of a rising talent. To emerge as a true movie star — the kind that Gluck has introduced in Easy A (Emma Stone) and, most recently, Anyone But You (Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell) — requires that presence, that mystique, that’s hard to articulate and harder still to find nowadays, as attention spans scatter and fandoms shrink into niches. “I can’t explain it, but I know it when I see it,” as Clooney puts it.

Industry power players believe Turner holds that quality. Now comes the moment where audiences need to show up and agree.

“If you’re a guy like Callum who is really funny while also physical, and can be an action-movie hero — those are the ingredients that we used to have in movie stars,” Gluck says. The director saw that Easy A would launch Stone from her first audition. The tremendous success of Anyone But You not only reasserted the viability of theatrical rom-coms but proved that Sweeney and Powell had the goods to lure millions to cinemas. Gluck believes Turner is approaching a similar turning point: “He can do anything.”

Clooney thinks so, too. He says that if he had his way, Turner would become the next face of one of global cinema’s most revered, bankable franchises — as has been hinted at in tabloids and whispers around town for months.

“I hope Callum ends up being the next Bond. I think he would be a great Bond,” Clooney says, unprompted. “He’s tall and handsome and charming and British, so he’s the perfect guy to do it.”

Turner won’t givee me an inch on that score. “I know as much as you do — really, I know as much as you do,” he says, after I mention Amazon MGM’s recent announcement that casting for the new James Bond film, to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, had officially begun. Is he at least interested in taking the gig, should it be offered? Turner laughs to himself, looking down at his sneakers. “I’m not going to comment on that.”

Betting markets such as Kalshi have Turner as the clear favorite. Jacob Elordi is thought to be in the hunt — “He certainly looks like a great Bond. I mean, why not?” his Saltburn co-star Rosamund Pike recently told GQ — and Sunset Boulevard‘s Tom Francis reportedly auditioned for the coveted role. No one can hide from this rumor mill. So what can Turner say about the breathless speculation?

“I’ll tell you what’s so funny about the Bond thing: Even your best friends ask you, people text you that you haven’t spoken to for 10 years — and you know nothing!” Turner says. “It’s such a weird thing of something happening and nothing happening at all. I genuinely know nothing. I just find it quite amusing.”

We’re in Regent’s Park, where Turner often walks Golo, his beloved Labrador-Rottweiler mix who travels with him from job to job around the world. No dog today, though. It’s a scalding late-May afternoon in Central London, so Turner and his then fiancée (and now wife), Grammy-winning artist Dua Lipa, took their pup to nearby Hampstead Heath early in the morning to beat the heat.

Turner then drove himself over to meet me. The sea of tourists swarming the park’s iconic rose gardens suddenly parted, making way for the budding movie star wearing a Brut Archives tee over a long-sleeved undershirt and crisp tan shorts. His solid 6-foot-2 frame all but glided across the sweaty crowd to shake my hand. He blends in well enough, but come on. This is his home turf, with even those recognizing him keeping a respectful distance.

He guided us out of the scrum, and we were now heading north. “I never really come into this part of the park because there are no dogs allowed,” he says. “Let’s go that way because when we get out of this rose garden, it gets a bit more expansive.”

For the past four-ish weeks, Turner has been home in London — a luxury given his pace of life lately. He and Lipa lived for the first few months out of the year in Paris, where Turner took virtual French lessons five days a week, and they’re about to go to the U.S. for seven months as Turner goes into production on major back-to-back movies: a remake of the horror classic Possession, co-starring Margaret Qualley and directed by Smile’s Parker Finn, and Marielle Heller’s baseball film The Comebacker, based on an original story by Dave Eggers and backed by Sony, in which Tom Hanks plays pitching coach to Turner’s major leaguer.

Yet before that, Turner and Lipa would officially tie the knot just a 15-minute walk away from here at the Old Marylebone Town Hall, on the last Sunday in May — then party the next weekend in Sicily alongside the likes of Elton John, Charli XCX and Joe Alwyn, with the Italian press obsessing over their every move. Turner brings up his life partner often during our time together, describing how she inspires him artistically but staying tight-lipped about their impending nuptials. “You want to be inspired by the person you’re with,” he says. As to how they juggle their demanding schedules: “We make sure that we’re together as much as possible.”

He’s enjoyed staying put with her for the time being. Turner just read the first few chapters of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a recommendation from Lipa’s popular upmarket book club Service95. Last night, he and Lipa went to the theater to see the horror sensation Obsession. “I don’t like horror movies, I just want to get back to my book. I mean, I’m about to go do one, so it’s not that I’m not into them — it’s just that they scare me!”

Even watching his beloved Chelsea football team get knocked out for the season, just before our chat, brought Turner some familiar hometown comfort. “Today, when I went out to go get coffee, this asshole went, ‘You finished 10th!’ Like, ‘That’s the first thing you’re going to say to me?’ ” Turner says, grinning. ” ‘Why are you giving it to me? Your team won!’ But I love it. I love the pantomime.”

This is a period of calm before a great storm of attention. Turner assures me he doesn’t carry the anxiety, as most in his position might, of what will happen over the next few months. In a year of cautious box office optimism, all eyes are on Universal’s One Night Only to see if it can keep the big-screen rom-com revival alive — with Turner’s and Barbaro’s star wattage set for particular scrutiny as they sell the thing with all their might.

“I don’t think about that,” Turner says of the movie’s commercial performance as we claim a shady park bench overlooking a meadow. “I want the movie to do incredibly well, obviously, but yeah — I don’t think about that.” Is it hard to keep that pressure to deliver out of mind? “It’s very easy to not think about it.”

It helps that Turner stays off the internet. One Night Only‘s high-concept premise — two single New Yorkers find themselves drawn to each other on the one night of the year where it is legal for unmarried people to have sex — has already set the internet ablaze. After the trailer dropped, The Guardian published the headline, “The Purge but for sex?” Social media exploded with the usual snark and skepticism.

“I haven’t seen that because I don’t like to go online — it’s so addictive, right? The phone?” Turner says. (Lipa does, anyway — she has 87.7 million Instagram followers and posts often on their world travels.) “If you allow yourself to buy into the absurdity of it, you’ll have a good time. Don’t be a stickler for the rules, or go watch something else. Go watch a documentary.”

Turner brings all of his swoony, puppy-dog charm to the movie. “He’s so disarming, and it’s not manipulative, the way that everyone kind of melts and becomes themselves in front of him — he allows other people to become themselves,” Gluck says.

Coming into this project, Turner had just wrapped Eternity, another high-concept romance that was distributed by A24. He watched scene-stealers John Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph “kill it” with every take in broadly comic roles. Their work pushed him to say yes to One Night Only, albeit nervously. “I was really inspired by those guys. When Will and I started speaking, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m in,’ because I’d seen them just make magic,” Turner says. “I’m not anywhere near their level, but it’s a different thing that I’m trying to achieve. It’s so scary.”

Eternity star Elizabeth Olsen observed Turner develop into an ideal comic foil. He came out of his shell before her eyes by leaning into a certain mythic quality: “Callum is such a classic movie star, matinee idol type of person. He doesn’t want to crack — and so when he does crack a bit, you’re really able to utilize that.”

Turner grew up on a working-class council estate within the wealthy London neighborhood of Chelsea. He had two early loves: football and movies. He pursued the former aggressively but was exposed to all kinds of culture and arts through his single mother, who worked in nightclubs as an owner and promoter. “Having my mom and her flamboyant friends live with us, there were different worlds that I was dipping into,” Turner says. “There was a lot of playacting as a kid to make my mom laugh.”

Until he entered adulthood, Turner never thought about acting as a job but was compelled by it as a form of expression. He decided to start taking classes at 20 after being rejected from drama school; this also was when he started modeling professionally. At 21, he signed with an agent. At 22, he nabbed a key role in ITV’s Leaving, opposite Helen McCrory. He kept going for a few years and then filmed his breakout role in Tramps, which sold to Netflix out of a buzzy Toronto premiere.

“I remember being with my agent on Skype, and I was like, ‘Fuck, this is what I want to do,’ ” Turner says of that period. “But I never wanted to be truly famous at a young age. I take my hat off to those guys who are famous so young and are able to handle it and deliver performances and behave with all these people around them.”

Turner calls Masters of the Air the moment where he was able to be “truly free with myself,” to attack a high-profile role with all those years of pent-up hunger and on-the-job training. “The challenge was: It wasn’t to be shied away from, it was to be seized with both hands,” he says.

By this point, Turner already was an avowed movie lover. He once said that he saw the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave four times in the theater at 23 years old during its first week of release — and you can draw a direct line from that prestige drama binge to his current viewing habits. This week alone, in addition to Obsession, Turner screened The Father with Anthony Hopkins, the Japanese drama Nobody Knows and, probably for the 10th time, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This most recent rewatch took place alongside Lipa.

“It was the first time she’d seen it, and I was like, ‘There are some famous faces here — let me see if you can guess them,’ ” Turner says, cracking himself up. “I was such a dickhead about it: ‘I’ve seen this film before, so see if you can notice these things!’ “

For the record, Turner’s colleagues tend to appreciate his rich knowledge base.

On the set of Masters of the Air, Turner got close with Butler. Here were two actors on the cusp of substantial Hollywood fame, often isolated together because of COVID restrictions, embarking on an intensely physical and emotional months-long shoot. “We bonded early over our shared love of cinema. We talked about actors and films we admired — Nicholson, De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, films like Mean Streets, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, There Will Be Blood,” Butler says. “It was nice having somebody around who spoke that same language.”

Or how about: “I think about Bresson every time I think about Callum,” Elizabeth Olsen tells me. Turner introduced her to the legendary midcentury French director as they got to know each other during Eternity. “He has such an affinity for Bresson films.”

“There is not a film that man hasn’t seen,” says George MacKay, Turner’s co-star in Rose of Nevada. On that bare-bones Cornwall set, Turner streamed movies on his phone whenever he had a moment. “There was one time where we were on the boat, and I’m like, ‘What are you watching?’ ” MacKay says. “It was an old black-and-white Italian movie, on a lunch break or something.”

When I pass along MacKay’s memory, Turner says immediately, “Well, that was Fists in the Pocket,” the 1965 Marco Bellocchio satire. Copy that.

Set in a remote coastal village, Rose of Nevada is defiantly idiosyncratic, true to the reputation of director Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men). It was shot with a clock-wound, 16mm Bolex camera that records for 27 seconds at a time and does not capture sound. The result is a surreal, beautiful tone poem, with MacKay and Turner finding quiet depth while their characters set sail and gut fish. It’s the kind of austere project where an actor shows up ready to get down and dirty. Turner had seen Jenkin’s earlier work and wondered, “Who the fuck is this guy?” and signed on to Rose of Nevada without reading a word of the script.

MacKay, who led Sam Mendes’ 1917 and next appears in Focus’ Sense and Sensibility adaptation, is two years younger than Turner. They auditioned for many of the same parts over the years and at last got to know each other on Rose of Nevada.

“I’ve been genuinely inspired by his ambition. You can feel the trajectory that he’s been carving for himself — Callum is rocketing toward the aspirations he has for being a big player in this industry, but not in a crass way,” MacKay says. “He doesn’t talk about it. He’s not there shouting from the rooftops. But you can feel it. … He wants to work with the best, and that’s what the ambition is for. That’s what I respect: It’s about wanting to be at the top of your game.”

Indeed, Turner is making strong choices as more options are placed before him. The summer pairing of Rose of Nevada and One Night Only — one a subtly uncompromising indie, the other a fizzy big-ticket studio picture — indicates the career shape he hopes to keep refining. “I guess everything’s taste … but I love big movies and I love small movies,” Turner says. “Why not see what I’m capable of?”

When asked for his list of dream directors, Turner smirks and says, “You want me to say Denis?” referring to Villeneuve, who will direct the next Bond (and yes, he is on it). Otherwise, he names a combo of the massive and the emerging — from Nolan and PTA to Earth Mama‘s Savanah Leaf and Scrapper’s Charlotte Regan, both of whom are in their early 30s and fresh off lauded debuts.

Turner’s focus on younger directors reflects what most encourages him about coming up at an often perilous moment for his industry. He cites a recent study revealing that Gen Z is now the most active theatergoing demographic. “It’s so exciting, and it’s interesting that the under-25s are sort of rebelling against their phones,” he says. “You remember when we were kids, we rebelled against our parents for whatever reason? They’re like, ‘I need to go to a dark room where I’m not allowed to get on my phone and I’m going not to use it.’ Now they’re building this ownership again over cinema.”

We’re taking another loop through the park, making our way back toward Turner’s car. Turner will be headed to a session with his dialect coach, with whom he’s collaborated on every movie that’s required some kind of notable vocal adjustment. This is an area of the craft that Turner takes very seriously.

“He’d stayed American the entire time, we wrapped at 5 a.m., and everyone on set, even the New Yorkers, were like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ They had no idea he was British,” Gluck says of their work on One Night Only.

Clooney had the same experience on The Boys in the Boat: “He walked in with an American accent the first time I met him. The entire time we shot, he had an American accent — I’d never heard him with a British accent. We had a wrap party, and he started speaking with a British accent. I felt like I lost a friend.”

Stories like this speak to what’s clear after a few hours spent with Turner: He takes none of this for granted. He recalls the period after he’d shot Masters of the Air and Boys in the Boat, projects that together were poised to change his life, as one of unnerving limbo. Release plans kept pushing due to industry strikes and lingering pandemic woes. He turned jobs down to make sure he’d be available for press, whenever the time came. He wanted to do it right. The delay was emotional, frustrating, but his colleagues took notice of the way he carried himself, before and after. He proved patient.

“Everybody’s got a cellphone, so one drunk night could stand out, or if you’re Timothée Chalamet, you can say one thing that doesn’t land well and it follows you around like crazy,” Clooney says. “It’s very hard to avoid doing something dumb early on in your career now — much harder than it was when I was young. Having a good head on his shoulders, understanding who he is, makes a big difference for Callum along the way.”

Even filmmakers who haven’t worked with Turner yet are catching on — say, the only two American directors selected for the main competition at last month’s Cannes Film Festival. Turner reveals he was set to star in a previous iteration of Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, the ’80s queer drama ultimately starring Rami Malek that premiered to warm reviews. They were introduced to each other for the project as it seemingly moved forward. (“I said ‘yeah,’ and he said ‘yeah,’ ” as Turner puts it.) Although Sachs’ movie later changed shape and Turner fell out, they got close. When Turner was last in New York, he texted Sachs asking if he wanted to get a drink. They wound up going to see jazz together.

Turner also had met with Paper Tiger director James Gray for a role over a scheduled one-hour Zoom that wound up running four hours. “I was like, ‘I have to go,’ and he was like, ‘Where the fuck do you have to go?’ ” Turner remembers with a laugh. “I said, ‘I can’t just talk to you all day!’ You know when you just click with someone? We’re buddies now.”

Gray recently invited Turner and Lipa to his home for a dinner party while they were visiting Los Angeles. They couldn’t make it but stopped by the place later that night, per Gray’s initial suggestion. Unfortunately, it was late enough where Gray had just texted them not to come because he and the family were going to bed. “He was like, ‘I can’t believe you turned up at my house this late, you motherfucker,’ ” Turner says. “We had this little tête-à-tête, all of us, and then we chilled for an hour or so. Then Dua beat them all at backgammon. She’s a killer at backgammon.”

As we exit the park, no word yet on what Turner and Lipa will be up to tonight. “Dua and I both have a pretty strong pool of art that we love and draw upon and share with each other,” he says. They’d settled on Cuckoo’s Nest the other night while scrolling their streaming queue, with the understanding of Turner’s deep love for it. He plans on doing a deeper dive into Nicholson’s oeuvre soon.

Referring back to Turner’s ongoing horror marathon, in prep for Possession, I mention Toni Collette’s tour de force in Hereditary. Turner admits that, of director Ari Aster’s catalog, he’s only seen Midsommar — having deliberately put the rest aside. “I do this thing where sometimes I withhold on people — it’s kind of stupid or brilliant, I don’t know,” Turner says. “I’d never listened to The Beatles until three years ago.” Again, this was intentional. Why? “Because I knew they were so brilliant that I wanted something to look forward to.”

He adds, “I’m fucking ecstatic that I did because I’m so in love with them.”

This is a guy who believes in discipline, but don’t mistake that for perfectionism. He’s aware of the potential for disappointment and failure. He still wants to take the leap. “It’s great to fall on your face because if you try something and it doesn’t work, at least you tried it,” he says. “It’s like in Cuckoo’s Nest when he can’t lift the fountain to escape — at least he tried. You’ve just got to try it, man.”

He’s newly married, with the biggest movie release of his career in a few months and high-profile new roles to tackle the rest of the year. Those pesky Bond rumors still trail him. Yet he appears enviably relaxed before me. He takes out his keys as we approach the rows of cars, parked off the greening early summer grass. “I’m excited. I feel like I’m in such a good place,” he says. “This is everything I wanted.”

Via: The Hollywood Reporter