Hey, casting brokers, pay attention up. Oliver Jackson-Cohen is intrigued in lighter roles.

That doesn’t necessarily mean he hasn’t liked the darker, from time to time scarier fare he’s mainly appeared in all through the past number of yrs — but his mother states he requires a crack.

Mom’s commentary came final calendar year when Jackson-Cohen arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia, to film the new series “Surface,” now streaming weekly on Apple Television+. She said to him, “‘You’re not going to participate in a single of your unfortunate boys, are you?’”

“I went, ‘What?’ She stated, ‘You’re generally (expletive) sad. Do anything gentle that I can go and enjoy seeing,’” Jackson-Cohen claimed with a chuckle. “So that sort of trapped with me.”

It is been a fast paced handful of a long time. Jackson-Cohen’s latest profession highlights consist of Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” series and its observe-up, “The Haunting of Bly Manor.” He also terrorized Elisabeth Moss in “The Invisible Man” and performed Dakota Johnson’s managing partner in “The Lost Daughter.” He did get a respite, nonetheless, in this summer’s rom-com “Mr. Malcolm’s Record,” an expertise he describes as “a joyful romp.”

In “Surface,” Jackson-Cohen stars reverse Gugu Mbatha-Uncooked as James, a partner desperately striving to continue to keep the pretenses of a pleased relationship afloat soon after an accident caused his wife, Sophie (Mbatha-Uncooked), to eliminate her very long-term memory. The additional James tries to masquerade past difficulties, the much more suspicious and distant Sophie gets.

“There’s anything so appealing when someone’s sitting on a bunch of strategies,” he reported. “That makes so significantly tension, and if you are not allowed to say specific points and you’re holding so much again, it can be browse in a multitude of unique ways. Ideally, it’s labored and it does occur throughout as overprotective or controlling or no matter what it is — or, sinister. But ideally, you know, as the demonstrate goes on and the layers are sort of peeled, you notice what is all…