It’s a huge year for the actor. He’s starring in Operation Mincemeat, a wartime yarn that sees Fleming amassing Bond plots, as well as appearing in a Talented Mr Ripley remake – and singing his own songs in a musical heist thriller
Born in South Africa, educated privately in the UK, settled with his wife and three children in the hipster heart of east London but speaking today from Rome, Johnny Flynn gets around. The actor-musician (half-brother to Jerome Flynn of the chart-topping acting-singing duo Robson and Jerome) is currently shooting a new TV version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. This one is being adapted and directed by Steven Zaillian, who wrote Schindler’s List and The Irishman, and stars Andrew Scott as the amoral antihero. Flynn, who has long forks of blond hair, as well as a scar in the shape of a question mark rising from the bridge of his nose (the result of a dog attack when he was three), plays Ripley’s idol-cum-quarry, Dickie Greenleaf.
It is the role for which Jude Law was Oscar-nominated in Anthony Minghella’s highly regarded 1999 film version. Daunting? “I won’t lie,” he grins when we talk via Zoom. “It’s definitely something I’m trying not to think about, which is an effort because I love that film.” This new spin, he says, is “quite beautiful and quite noir. It’s in the Fellini zone.”
