Finneas’ New Groove

As Billie Eilish’s main co-writer and producer — and, crucially, her older brother, too — Finneas O’Connell has had an all-access pass to the singer’s explosive career. Usually, he’s right there with her, playing in her live show or joining her for performances at television’s most coveted stops: the Oscars, the Grammys, Saturday Night Live. But lately, he’s been experiencing her career more like the rest of us do — as a spectator. And to be honest, it’s a little stressful.

“I feel the way you might feel if you watched your friend compete in a sport,” says Finneas (who releases music under his first name), sipping an Emergen-C drink as we chat. It’s only been a few days since he watched Eilish headline New York City’s Madison Square Garden, and though he admits to being a bit “snobby” about live music in general — “I’m too on the inside of the whole thing” — he’s still feeling the buzz. “I want to make sure she doesn’t trip or have something thrown at her. There are a lot of modern fans who are throwing not tomatoes, but their phone or a gift — throwing a package and just beaning singers. I have anxiety about that.” (Who can blame him? Last year saw too many headlines about pop stars getting hit with fan-launched projectiles.) “But I don’t feel like, ‘Oh, man, it should be me up there with her!’” he continues. “It’s fun to go up and sing a song, but I’ve really enjoyed just watching the shows.”

These days, audiences are getting to experience Finneas in a new context, too. For starters, there’s his latest solo album, For Cryin’ Out Loud!, a live-wire pop-rock effort that finds him stepping out of his bedroom-pop zone to write and record with a full band for groovy tracks like “Cleats” and “2001”; he’ll keep the party going on a headlining tour early next year. “The people that I’ve asked to play with me are really close friends of mine, so it’s been a really fun experience,” he says.

And then there’s his enviable load of extracurriculars, including scoring the Alfonso Cuarón Apple TV+ miniseries Disclaimer and acting opposite Stephanie Hsu in the upcoming Peacock comedy series Laid, about a woman whose past hookups keep mysteriously dying. “I’ve been so lucky in my whole career that the idea that now I’m trying to go be an actor is a little hilarious,” Finneas, 27, says. “In terms of my music career, even as a solo artist, I’ve surpassed the hopes that I had for that. So if the acting world, filmmakers, directors are like, Nah — I’ve had a great run. I’ve done all the things I wanted to do.”

Acting, however, isn’t a new job. Before Finneas was a two-time Oscar winner for best original song (for the Bond theme “No Time to Die” and the Barbie ballad “What Was I Made For?”), he was just a teen actor cobbling together an IMDb page with small roles on Modern Family and Glee. “The difference between me now and me as an 18-year-old was, at 18, I would audition for anything,” he says. “I’d audition for a pizza delivery guy or whatever because I needed the money. Now, it’s not so much a financial thing as it is just a cool opportunity.”

He is, perhaps surprisingly, a bit of a theater nerd. “I would love to go be in theater,” he says. One of the best parts of working with Hsu, who acted on Broadway before her breakout role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, was getting to pepper her with “a bunch of theater questions.” Finneas loves Arthur Miller — “I saw All My Sons when I was in high school and was very, very moved by it” — and has gotten into the work of the more contemporary Tony-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, The Comeuppance). “I’m interested in people’s relationships with each other,” he says, reflecting on his tastes. “I’m interested in small stories about a family or a romantic relationship or a relationship over the course of many years. When I think of my favorite pieces of film and theater and art, it’s not necessarily about a war or a spaceship or something like that. It’s just people.”

“I think I could crush an Adele song. I think I could make a really good Paramore album.”

Relationships, after all, are the primary driving force in his life, from Eilish to Claudia Sulewski, the actor and content creator he’s been dating since 2018 (who also costars in the video for “For Cryin’ Out Loud!”). “In addition to loving her as an individual person and liking her opinions and her jokes and her talents,” he says, “[I love] the companionship and teamwork.” The mark of true couple compatibility, according to Finneas, “is when something annoying happens — your dog gets sprayed by a skunk, or it’s raining and there are leaks in your house — and you have a person there to suffer with a little bit, but that makes it much less bad.” (To wit: The couple’s 6-year-old pitbull, Peaches, recently had to get surgery after tearing both ACLs “in the name of catching a squirrel,” and Finneas says he’ll rush home after today’s photo shoot for his dog-dad shift feeding Peaches “peanut butter and pills.”)

For Finneas, making music usually means creating “something from nothing — I get in a room and create, create, create, create until something exists,” he says, whether he’s hunkering down for entire albums with Eilish or helping out pop stars like Camila Cabello or Tate McRae for a track or two. Acting, on the other hand, feels like being a session musician, called to deliver one specialized part of a complex whole. He gets thrills out of both sides of the creative coin.

“The appeal to me is working with people who I want to be around, working with people who I think are artists like [Barbie director] Greta [Gerwig] or Alfonso,” he says. “If they said, ‘I don’t want music in this next project, but I’d like you to act,’ that would be a dream come true. But only because I’d get to work with them again.”

“When I think of my favorite pieces of film and art, it’s not necessarily about a war or a spaceship. It’s just people.”

There are a few surprises on his musical bucket list. “I think I could crush an Adele song,” he says. “I think I could crush it whenever a new boy band blows up.” (In a way, he already has: He and Eilish wrote three songs for the fictional boy band 4*Town in Pixar’s 2022 film Turning Red, and Finneas voiced one of the members.) “I think I could make a really good Paramore album,” he adds.

But getting Finneas to list more dream collaborators isn’t easy. “It’s more satisfying to be close to the chest about it and let it unfold,” he says. “That would be like telling somebody: ‘Hey, do you want to see this movie?’ And then telling them everything that happens in it. I’d rather just let it happen.”

Top Image Credits: le PÈRE sweater, Junya Watanabe jeans