Josh O'Connor: "A Motorcycle Turned Up To Take The Script Away The Next Morning"

Speaking to Deadline this week, Josh O'Connor finally answered the question every Disclosure Day obsessive has been throwing at him on every red carpet since CinemaCon: just how tight is the lid on this thing?

The answer, it turns out, is "tight enough that they pulled the script out of his hands while he was making another movie."

One Night With The Pages

O'Connor was on location for Rian Johnson's third Knives Out film when Universal arranged the secret delivery. A courier on a motorcycle handed him a physical copy of the screenplay. He had less than a day with it. The next morning, the same motorbike pulled back up to the hotel to retrieve it.

No emailed PDFs. No locked iPad. No watermarked PDF tied to his Apple ID. Just paper, in his hands, for one evening — and then gone again.

For an actor offered a lead role in a Steven Spielberg movie, that’s a tough way to evaluate a job. But it’s also a measure of how seriously Amblin and Universal are treating the third-act material that Spielberg has now publicly admitted contains "surprises I would like audiences to experience with the lights down and their phones off."

"It Makes Sense"

"It's a very strange experience but it makes sense. You know, anytime you hear that Steven's got a film coming out, everyone, myself included, wants to know what it is, so I totally understand why."

O'Connor’s framing is generous — this is a Spielberg movie about UAPs, in 2026, after three years of congressional hearings and David Grusch testimony. Of course every leak would be combed for breadcrumbs. The motorcycle courier isn’t paranoia. It’s logistics.

The Pattern Of Secrecy Around Disclosure Day

O'Connor’s motorcycle anecdote is the latest in a growing list of unusual security measures around the production:

• Working title "Non-View" — the project shot under a code name from February 2025 onward
• Closed sets — the Kansas City broadcast sequence was reportedly shot with non-essential crew dismissed and only Spielberg, Janusz Kamiński, and the principal cast on stage
• Spielberg’s personal pre-screening control — the director has reportedly insisted that no preview audience ever sees the third act before opening weekend
• The Empire June cover photo shoot — even the actors’ promotional images were vetted to remove any incidental wardrobe details that might tip the plot

For comparison: Avengers: Endgame used watermarked digital scripts and fake pages to mislead leakers. Disclosure Day appears to have skipped digital entirely.

What This Tells Us About The Film

The harder a studio guards a film, the bigger the swing. Movies with conventional plots don’t need motorcycle couriers. Movies with a third-act reveal that hinges on a single image — or a single sentence — absolutely do.

It is now public knowledge that Spielberg quietly floated the "future humans" UAP hypothesis at CinemaCon. It is public knowledge that Emily Blunt confirmed in Empire that "questions posed by Close Encounters are answered in Disclosure Day." Both of those statements would be unremarkable on a normal press tour. On a film with a motorcycle-courier script, they read as warnings: the answer in this movie is the kind of answer you cannot un-hear.

Forty-three days to find out.

Disclosure Day opens in theaters and IMAX on June 12, 2026.

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