First Look: Danny Boyle Didn’t Want to Make Rupert Murdoch a Villain in Ink

When Danny Boyle first saw the play Ink on the West End in 2017, he was quickly convinced it could make a great film. Written by James Graham, the play follows a young Rupert Murdoch as he acquires The Sun and teams up with editor Larry Lamb to build a bold new kind of newspaper that would upend British print journalism.

But studios and financiers weren’t sold on the idea. “People couldn’t understand why I wanted to do it,” Boyle tells Vanity Fair. “It felt like a lot of people didn’t think it would work. And that always drives me on. I like to prove myself with what really fires me up.”

His adaptation, starring Guy Pearce as Murdoch and Jack O’Connell as Lamb, opens the Venice Film Festival on September 2, and Netflix will release it in theaters on December 11. For Boyle, the director of Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and 28 Years Later, the story is not just about journalism in its heyday, but about how the success of The Sun has had a lasting influence on how news and truth are handled today. “I just thought it was so relevant,” says Boyle, “because it makes you think about where we are now, how we’ve got to where we’ve got to, and also the future of the press, the future of the truth.”

“I think he represents a whole hangover of a very buttoned-up time that is being exposed to this debauchery and how you package and sell that,” says O’Connell of Lamb.

The film opens with an intense meeting where Murdoch is trying to woo Lamb to run the newly purchased Sun and make it the greatest paper in the world. That happened to be in 1969, the same year of the Apollo 11 mission. Says Boyle, “I really do believe that that meeting between them had more of an impact on our world than the men landing on the moon.”

Boyle succeeds in making a thrilling, propulsive movie using his signature kinetic filmmaking style of quick cuts, unconventional camera angles, and a frantic pace. This is no sleepy play adaptation, but what’s most striking is the way it captures one of the most powerful men alive. Boyle and Graham lean into what audiences think they know about a figure of this stature, then upend it, asking who was really pulling the strings. “You think Murdoch is going to arrive into the story fully formed,” says Graham. “But he’s still developing and he’s still learning, and it’s this other guy who you’ve never heard of, who is using all of his disgust, anger, resentment, passion for the news to invent something new.”

“If you monsterize, you just easily free yourself of responsibility,” says Boyle about capturing Rupert Murdoch in this era. “Where, in fact, we are responsible for this.”

British playwright James Graham has written scripts about many real-life figures including British football manager Gareth Southgate, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., a young Margaret Thatcher, and Tammy Faye Bakker. With Ink, he found himself fascinated by the duo of Murdoch and Lamb and the paper’s meteoric rise. “In that one single year it transformed from being a completely failing entity, like in a sports movie, getting lots of underdogs and rejects together to try and make something out of it, and then becoming, eventually, the biggest-selling paper in the English-speaking world,” says Graham.

The play was a huge success—racking up four Olivier Award nominations in 2018 and winning two Tony Awards after it hit Broadway in 2019. After Graham adapted it into a script with producer Michael Ellenberg, Boyle jumped at the opportunity to come on board to direct. “He’s somehow managed to make it a Danny Boyle movie with all that energy and that punky spirit and that kineticism,” says Graham, “and yet also he’s really honored the soul of the play somehow.”

When the play was running, Murdoch got a lot of the attention and headlines as such a major figure in business and media. But Boyle felt the more fascinating character was actually Lamb, who arrives in London as a northern outsider with something to prove. Boyle, who grew up near Manchester, related to the chip on Lamb’s shoulder. “We carry it our whole lives about southerners and about feeling like the outsider and the underdog,” says Boyle. “We’ve always got that with us.”

In Ink, The Sun leans into sensational stories and photos of women to woo readers.

He cast O’Connell, whom he’d previously worked with on 2025’s 28 Years Later, as Lamb because he thought the British actor could capture sympathy from the audience even when Lamb grew more and more aggressive with the salacious ways in which The Sun would cover stories. “He’s empathetic even in characters that really shouldn’t be,” says Boyle. “There’s always an empathy point that a great actor will find, and he seems to be able to find them.”

O’Connell, who recently played an ancient Irish immigrant vampire in Sinners, wasn’t familiar with Lamb before taking on the role. “It turns out he’s a very prominent figure in influencing modern-day culture in this country, but he operated very much in the dark,” says O’Connell. “Like a lot of these guys that were constantly reporting on people that were in the spotlight, they remained anonymous the whole time, which is interesting.”

Ink follows Lamb as he recruits a scrappy staff for his new version of The Sun, which includes one female reporter, Jules, played by Claire Foy. Jules is an amalgam of real women who worked on Fleet Street—the street in central London that was, for a time, the center of the British newspaper industry, where virtually every major British newspaper had its offices. Early on in the film, Murdoch is pushing Lamb to make his paper stand out from The Daily Mirror, which was the most popular newspaper at the time. Lamb packs his paper with pun-filled headlines, sports coverage, celebrity gossip, and human-interest stories, and brings in the highly controversial topless glamour photos of women which led to a dramatic increase in sales in the 1970s.

“It seems so cinematic, given that it was true, the events that happen in the order that they happen,” says Boyle of the story of Ink.

Lamb grows obsessed with becoming the number one paper in the world, and Murdoch eventually worries he’s pushed things too far, especially when Muriel McKay, the wife of Murdoch’s deputy, is kidnapped and The Sun runs the details in its paper. Boyle knew people would come into the film with a certain sense about the Australian-born billionaire. “It’s inevitable that somebody with that kind of power and the way that he uses it is monsterized,” says Boyle. “So you’ve got to undo that if you want to make an interesting film.”

Boyle cast Pearce because he knew he wanted an Australian in the role who would understand Murdoch’s history. He and Pearce discussed what aspects of Murdoch they related to or even admired. “He was an underdog,” says Boyle. “He was treated appallingly by the civilized world of the owners of Fleet Street who regarded him as a savage because he comes from Australia.”

Claire Foy plays Jules, a fictional character based on women who worked on Fleet Street during that time.

For the film, Boyle didn’t reach out to Murdoch or the family of Lamb, who died in 2000. Murdoch had seen the stage play in both London and New York, even visiting the cast backstage. “He asked some questions about our research,” remembers Graham. “He was really enamored by the building of the world, how we showed how you make a newspaper in the old days. He oddly found that really romantic.”

The film is romantic about that era in journalism, packed with lingering shots of typeset letters and freshly printed pages flying off the press. But Boyle doesn’t let the film wallow in nostalgia, and instead ends it in a place that allows audiences to ruminate on what this aggressive new style of reporting has led to: a media culture that we’re all still living inside. “That was an ignition point for where we are now,” he says. “And I really believe you can trace it back because it’s about attitude to authority. It’s about attitude to central governance, central truth.”