Now the talented multi-tasker is co-starring in a musical heist featuring his own songs. So what drives him on?
Like most of us, the current turmoil in British politics has seen Johnny Flynn – actor, folk musician, the kind of multi-hyphenate who plays the hurdy-gurdy – spend the past few weeks doom-scrolling and current-affairs-obsessing. Flynn is a multitasker. He is obsessed with news anchors and reporters and follows many of them on Twitter, noting, with alarm, how they think social media is the most important thing in the world. He now wakes up each morning with such genuinely worrying thoughts as: I wonder what Jacob Rees-Mogg said about Liz Truss last night. He likens the fearful voices drowned out by the media circus to a character in a Greek tragedy. Cassandra, he reckons, was destined to tell the truth but be ignored (Flynn is not against a classical reference). He finds it all horrible and depressing and dispiriting. He loves it.
For while it’s purgatory for the rest of us, for Flynn, it’s also research. He’s currently in Belfast, midway through shooting a new series called The Lovers, where he’s playing a self-obsessed political journalist – a “slightly younger Robert Peston or Andrew Marr”, he says, “one who is in with the millennials, or at least thinks he is”.
