By CONNOR RYAN

Jeff O’Donnell, GSB ’14, the Rose Hill student who garnered attention around campus last spring when he appeared in an episode of HBO’s “Girls,” is slated to make his big-screen debut next year in Ten Thousand Saints — a movie that is set to star a number of well-established actors, including Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Asa Butterfield (Hugo) and Ethan Hawke (Training Day).

“This is my first movie and it happens to be a big one, which is cool,” O’Donnell told The Fordham Ram Friday afternoon.

The movie — directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the husband-wife directing and writing team that earned an Oscar nomination in 2004 for the screenplay of American Splendor — is based on Eleanor Henderson’s 2011 novel of the same name.

The emotional coming-of-age story, which is centered on themes of addiction, relapse and the relationships made in between, begins in the 1980’s as Jude Keffy-Horn (played by Butterfield), a drug-fueled teenager, moves away from his adopted parents in Vermont and goes to New York City to live with his pot-dealing father, in search of a new start.

There, Jude finds himself part of an underground youth culture that is powered by a steadfast intolerance for drugs, meat and sex. But as he seeks to honor the memory of a fallen friend by getting himself together, Jude learns that trading a drug addiction for a sobriety addiction presents its own set of unique challenges.

O’Donnell describes his role of Tory Ventura as a bully and the captain of the football team at Jude’s Vermont high school who “gets involved in some illegal stuff.”

“Without giving too much away, he’s the total opposite of who I am in real life, so I was surprised I ended up getting [the part], but then again that’s why they call it acting,” he said. “Even at my final callback with the directors of the movie, they told me they were surprised I could make such a transformation.”

O’Donnell said he gathered with the cast two weeks ago for a table reading. The movie is slated to be released in 2015.

Mode magazine, an up-start fashion publication on campus, featured O’Donnell on the cover of a recent issue, labeling him a “campus heartthrob.”

Connor Ryan is a staff writer for The Fordham Ram. You can follow him on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/connortryan.