WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Owen Cooper hasn’t had thoughts of EGOT. He’s hardly had time to develop that kind of ambition in his short time as an actor. But, presented with the idea, he’s intrigued. And amused.
“Is that the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar and the Tony?” he asks, with a laugh. “I’ve got E, so I want it.”
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Cooper does, in fact, have “E.” He won an Emmy Award this year, at 15, for his astonishing-for-any-age performance as a 13-year-old suspected of a killing in Netflix's “Adolescence.” It was his first screen appearance, and his first performance that wasn’t for parents.
Still just 16, he's now been named one of The Associated Press’ Breakthrough Entertainers of 2025.
Speaking to the AP while sitting on a balcony at a West Hollywood hotel, Cooper concedes he has no idea how he’d ever win a Grammy, though he loves music (Oasis, Stone Roses). And a Tony feels daunting, though the one-take episodes of “Adolescence” required the work of a play.
“Even an Oscar,” he says. “I don’t know how I’ll win an Oscar.”
But, more broadly, Cooper knows what he does want to do.
“When I first started doing drama lessons, like I was just, I just didn’t want to do it,” he says. “I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of all these people. Now, I’m like, ‘I want to be one of those actors that are just fearless.’”
Cooper becomes Oscar-eligible in 2026, when he makes his film debut in director Emerald Fennell's buzzy adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” starring Margot Robbie. Cooper plays the younger version of Jacob Elordi's Heathcliff. He doesn't share scenes with the leading stars, but they interacted plenty.
“I’d always be going on set and they’d always just be coming off so I’d speak to Jacob loads,” he says. “I would always be next to Margot in the makeup chair so I speak to them quite a lot and they're really nice people.”
By the time the movie's shoot was done, Cooper was a star in his own right. “Adolescence” and all its acclaim arrived during filming of the Emily Brontë adaptation.
After the ordinary, modern environs of “Adolescence” and the other series he’s shot, “Film Club” — which premiered in October on BBC Three in the United Kingdom and is not yet available to watch in the U.S. — he was stunned by the setting, and the outfits, of “Wuthering Heights.”
“The attention to detail in that film was just insane,” he says. “Obviously I’ve not been in it a long time but it just blew my mind, like the set and just everything about it is just mad.”
He’ll remain in the distant past for his next film, director Tom Ford's “Cry to Heaven,” set in 18th century Italy and starring Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and, in her acting debut, Adele.
Cooper's clearly a prodigy, but he's no lab-grown child star or nepo baby. He's the youngest of three brothers from a non-industry family, raised in Northern England's Warrington, between Manchester and Liverpool. His accent has notes of both cities, but he's a devoted Liverpool supporter; soccer was the center of all his childhood ambitions — and most of his waking hours.
“I grew up near, like, a park so I would be on there since 8 in the morning to midnight just playing football,” he says. “It was just everything. I didn’t care about anything else.”
Acting became a secondary hobby when he began classes at 12 at Manchester's Drama MOB. But he loved it, and the school drew something special out of him that led to his landing “Adolescence” over hundreds of other candidates.
Stephen Graham, the series co-creator who won his own Emmy for playing Cooper’s father, has called him “the talent of a generation” and “the next Robert De Niro.”
On that note, Cooper says he wants to work with “gods of the game” like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher. But he doesn't want heavy drama to define him.
“I want to do horror, I want to do, like, a superhero, I want to do sci-fi,” he says. “I just want to do everything.”
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For more on AP’s 2025 class of Breakthrough Entertainers, visit https://apnews.com/hub/ap-breakthrough-entertainers.