Ready to Burst onto the Scene: Jack Reynor

Thanks to a stellar performance in What Richard Did and with two big-budget movies in the pipeline, Jack Reynor looks set to be the next big Irish thing in Hollywood.

This time three years ago, Jack Reynor was attending the renowned rugby school Belvedere College in Dublin. Over the next eighteen months or so he’ll be seen on screen alongside Hollywood bigwigs Vince Vaughn and Mark Wahlberg in movies produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Michael Bay.

That’s a pretty steep career graph by any stretch of the imagination but if the early evidence is anything to go by, Jack Reynor appears as if he’ll be well able to handle it.

With a name like that, Jack Reynor seemed almost destined for a career in the movie business and after moving to Ireland from Colorado when he was just a toddler, acting has been a part of Reynor’s life pretty much ever since.

Not that anyone would have thought Reynor was destined for greatness judging by his first role, however, as he played a tree – that’s right, a tree – in a nativity play in primary school in Blessington, although being relegated to the margins did spark in him a determination to prove his worth thereafter.

“I was a piece of the set and I stood there in a tracksuit with a tree mask on,” Reynor is quoted as saying in The Daily Mail earlier this year.

“And having stood there for two days with everyone else playing parts, I said, “Feck this – I’m going to become an actor just to teach her (his teacher, Jane Lawlor) a lesson.”

Thankfully things picked up for Reynor after that humbling experience and he appeared in an extra in Country, a film directed by Kevin Liddy, while also starring in an ad for the National Dairy Council that featured the famous line ‘Them bones them bones need calcium and that’s a natural law’, an experience which Reynor reluctantly elaborated upon during an appearance on the Late Late last month.

It was in Belvedere that Reynor really focussed on his acting career, appearing in a number of stage productions and once he left, he appeared in Kirsten Sheridan’s Dollhouse before being cast by Lenny Abrahamson in What Richard Did, story loosely based on the Anabel killing in Dublin in 2000.

Playing the lead character Richard Karlsen, Reynor delivered a brilliant performance that attracted plaudits from far and wide, earned him the best actor award at the IFTAs and made Hollywood sit up and take notice of the talented 21-year old.

Since What Richard Did, Reynor has already finished filming The Delivery Man, starring Vince Vaughn and our own Simon Delaney and has already been confirmed for a big role alongside Mark Wahlberg in Transformers 4, which is due for release in June 2014.

Commenting on his decision to pick Reynor for the role director Michael Bay said at the time: “I just hired a great new actor for Transformers 4. Jack Reynor… is an Irish kid that came to America with 30 bucks in his pocket. Pretty ballsy. Seriously, who does that?”

Whatever your thoughts on Bay or the Transformers series, the earning power and appeal of the series is hard to argue with and it has made stars out of the likes of Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox and Rosie Huntington-Whitely in the past.

Reynor’s star is rising at the moment but it will be fully-formed before long and alongside the likes of Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Saoirse Ronan, we'll have another Hollywood A-lister we can be very proud to call our own.