The final scene of 28 Years Later prompted two very different reactions. Most American and international audiences were delighted and intrigued to meet Jack O’Connell’s Sir Jimmy Crystal and his gang of merry zombie killers, dressed in colorful jumpsuits and platinum blonde wigs. But for audiences in the U.K. or anyone familiar with the story of real-life monster Jimmy Savile, O’Connell’s character evoked a very different type of horror.
Savile was a children’s entertainer who was widely beloved in Britain. After his death in 2011, however, the truth came out, in the form of hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse that had been covered up by his bosses at the BBC. Modeling O’Connell’s villain after Saville seemed to be a twisted reference to that horrific story, which would never have become public knowledge in the film’s alternate reality where British civilization collapsed in the early 2000s. In an interview with Business Insider, screenwriter Alex Garland framed it as a response to modern political culture and its reliance on a falsely idealized past.
“The thing about looking back is how selective memory is and that it cherry picks and it has amnesia and crucially it also misremembers,” Garland said, “and we are living in a time right now, which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past.”
28 Years Later ends abruptly before we can learn much of anything about Sir Jimmy Crystal, but six months later, we get a much better understanding of the character in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, written by Garland and directed by Nia DaCosta. Jimmy is a satanist who believes he’s the son of the devil and communicates with him directly. He also leads a gang of children (all named Jimmy) on a violent quest to rid the world of human weakness.
For O’Connell, who plays a leading role in the film, the connection between Sir Jimmy Crystal and Jimmy Saville was a key part of his performance.
“The clues were in the writing and so understanding what Alex was trying to say there was important to me,” O’Connell tells Polygon. “I’m sort of on board with the messaging. It is a comment on unchecked power.”
Saville’s horrible behavior went unchecked during his life, and (without getting into spoilers) Jimmy Crystal gets away with some equally awful activities throughout the course of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. The irony, however, is that Jimmy Crystal has no idea the character he’s dressed up as was secretly a monster. Instead, the similarity works on two levels, unlocking the character’s psychology for the audience while making a broader statement about the state of Britain in these movies.
“The zeitgeist just paused in 2001 when this infection ravaged society,” O’Connell says. “So it’s clinging onto that, and Jimmy doesn’t know what we know.”
Ultimately, while O’Connell can’t claim to know exactly what Garland is trying to reveal about Jimmy Saville or his role in the world, the actor sees the connections as a smart addition to a movie that already has plenty to say.
“I thought it was an interesting take and a clever one,” he says.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple releases in theaters on Jan. 16.
