Josh O’Connor Responds to Being Called a Heartthrob (Exclusive)

Movie fans may have identified Josh O’Connor as one of the industry’s hottest young stars, but the actor disagrees.

“No,” O’Connor says, with a laugh, after PEOPLE asked the actor, 35, whether or not he agrees with fan consensus that he is a “heartthrob” at the New York City premiere of his new movie The History of Sound on Tuesday, Sept. 2.

“Absolutely not. Yeah, absolutely not a heartthrob,” O’Connor adds.

O’Connor has risen to fame in recent years on the back of high-profile performances as the young King Charles III in Netflix’s The Crown and his provocative tennis player Patrick Zweig in last year’s Challengers, among others. In his latest drama, The History of Sound, O’Connor and Paul Mescal portray two young men who meet while studying music in Boston in the 1910s and subsequently fall in love after they bond over their music. The new movie follows both characters’ lives after they first meet.

O’Connor, who is friends with Mescal, 29, off the screen, tells PEOPLE that the two actors’ prior friendship “helped massively” while getting into character for the new movie. “Firstly, I feel so lucky when I get to work with my friends, and it doesn’t happen all that often, but sometimes. It just adds to the chemistry, I think,” he says. “And then on top of that, we are both big fans of each other’s work, and so it was just about responding to each other and doing what we normally do. It was great.”

“The truth is we are very serious actors, but we’re also kind of cheeky and silly and I think you needed to be on this film,” O’Connor adds of his and Mescal’s approach to working together. “You know, the thing about Paul is that he’s such a terrific performer, and he draws from him his own experience, as I do. And I think you sort of like sometimes have to counter that in between takes with Jolly Ranchers or candy jokes or silliness.”

O’Connor also tells PEOPLE that he learned to play the piano for his role in The History of Sound, which is one of three new movies he appears in this fall. Beyond The History of Sound, O’Connor also stars in The Mastermind, which releases in October, and he has a role as a clergyman in Daniel Craig’s next Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, which releases in November.

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In the meantime, O’Connor and Mescal costar with Chris Cooper in The History Of Sound. “Two young music students, Lionel and David, attending the Boston Conservatory in 1917, bond over their shared love of folk music,” reads an official synopsis for the movie. “They reconnect a few years later, embarking on a song-collecting trip in the backwaters of Maine.”

The History of Sound is in theaters Sept. 12.