Prior to the release of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Years Later, all we knew about Jack O'Connell's mysterious character was that he called himself Sir Jimmy Crystal, and that he was responsible for carving those initials into the infected man Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) encounter during their trip to the mainland.
As it turns out, Jimmy only has a very minor role in the movie. We first meet him as a child during the opening scene as he loses his entire family to an infected attack, and he returns in the film's final moments to rescue Alfie after he's cornered by a group of Ragers.
Adult Jimmy and his followers are all dressed like infamous British TV presenter Jimmy Savile, who died back in 2011 after a long history of sexual abuse against children.
"He's as much to do with pop culture as he is to do with sportswear, to do with cricket, to do with the honors system," Boyle told Business Insider of the decision to have Crystal and his cult adopt Savile's distinctive look. "It's all kind of twisting in this partial remembrance, clinging onto things and then recreating them as an image for followers."
"He's a kaleidoscope, isn't he?" Garland added of O'Connell's character. "A sort of trippy, [frick]ed up kaleidoscope."
"The thing about looking back is how selective memory is," the writer continued. "It cherry-picks and it has amnesia, and crucially, it also misremembers. We are living in a time right now which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past."
O'Connell's Jimmy Crystal and his gang are expected to play a much larger part in Nia DaCosta's sequel, The Bone Temple, which was filmed back-to-back with 28 Years Later and is set to release next year.
You can get a first official BTS look at the Jimmys below.
According to the official synopsis, "It’s been almost three decades since the rage virus escaped a biological weapons laboratory, and now, still in a ruthlessly enforced quarantine, some have found ways to exist amidst the infected. One such group of survivors lives on a small island connected to the mainland by a single, heavily-defended causeway. When one of the group leaves the island on a mission into the dark heart of the mainland, he discovers secrets, wonders, and horrors that have mutated not only the infected but other survivors as well."