Johnny Flynn plays Dickie Greenleaf in the television miniseries Ripley. Photo / AP
The actor plays Dickie Greenleaf in the Netflix show. He talks about eating pasta on set with Andrew Scott and his son coming to see his ‘raunchy’ play.
“It was a horrible moment,” Johnny Flynn says. He’s telling me about the first day of filming Ripley, when his co-star Andrew Scott, whom he was just getting to know, had to beat him up with an oar out at sea. “It was a rubber oar but he really bludgeoned me.”
Flynn plays Dickie Greenleaf, rich off inherited wealth but lacking purpose, alongside Scott as the charming, manipulative Tom Ripley. This Ripley, directed by the Schindler’s List screenwriter Steven Zaillian, couldn’t be less like the 1999 Anthony Minghella film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon and Jude Law. All the ice-cream pastel colour of Minghella’s movie is stripped away in favour of ominous black-and-white, and it begins slowly, before becoming more like a thriller. It has divided opinion, with some describing it as too drawn out and others as a work of art that nods to Federico Fellini and the golden age of Italian cinema.
“It’s not trying to be too zeitgeisty, which is a relief,” says Flynn, 41, who is at home in east London wearing a chunky burnt-orange jumper and running his hands through his tangled dirty blond hair. “It’s not like, say Saltburn, where you are told it has some message and you have to feel strongly one way or the other. It feels like a holiday from heavily politicised art.”
Filming on the Amalfi coast with Scott and Dakota Fanning (who plays Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge) sounds like a dream gig, but when I ask Flynn about it he looks miserable. “It was the hardest filming experience I’ve had; difficult in lots of ways,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “Steve knew what he wanted before we did anything. That was hard to get used to. Sometimes it felt like playing darts in the dark: you are trying to hit something but it’s only in his imagination, rather than directors who say, ‘I don’t know what this is; let’s find out together.’ Because I come from theatre I have a sense of ownership, creating something and making mistakes. Steve’s approach was more, ‘you do that’, a precise approach. It was cool but it took getting used to.”
Flynn, whose half-brother is the actor Jerome Flynn, has had an impressively varied career. In the Noughties he was better known as a musician, singing folk-inspired songs, with his friend Laura Marling and his band Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit — they’re going on tour again this summer. He has done blockbuster films — including One Life and Emma with Anya Taylor-Joy, theatre (he was nominated for an Olivier award for Jerusalem) and television (in the hilarious and underrated The Lovers on Sky he played an arrogant London-media-set news presenter who is relocated to Belfast).
Ripley took longer than planned to shoot because it was 2021 and they were hampered by Covid restrictions. While it was a joy hanging out with Scott (“We ate so much pasta but then we realised there’s a scene where we have to take all our clothes off and jump in the sea so we had to stop overindulging,” Flynn says), the actor “was homesick the whole time”. “We were stuck out there away from our families, which was tough on my kids. If I’d known how long it would be, I would have thought twice about it.”
Flynn has three children with his wife, a set designer; the youngest is six and we’re speaking on the eldest’s 13th birthday (Flynn can’t believe he’s now the parent of a teenager). “I find it really hard to be away from them. Nobody is used to it, especially not my wife; she gets really angry with me,” he says. After we speak, he’s off to the West End for the last night of The Motive and the Cue. He plays Richard Burton in it. There have been nearly 200 performances and he is “desperately trying to remind myself what is joyful about it — at 5.30pm when I leave my kids for the theatre I have to try to remember what’s good about this job and what this sacrifice is for. My poor wife is pretty fed up with not having a life because I’m doing the play every evening. I’m grateful and it’s been amazing but it’s pretty antisocial.”
He has turned down Broadway plays a couple of times “because it’s not worth it” — his father was an actor and away a lot, and Flynn doesn’t want to inflict that on his own family. His 13-year-old has asked to come to The Motive and the Cue for his birthday. “He’s seen it once before. It’s pretty raunchy and whenever I kiss Tuppence [Middleton, who plays Elizabeth Taylor], he looked across at my wife with a very confused expression.”
After the play he’s working on a graphic novel with the nature writer Robert Macfarlane, retelling the epic of Gilgamesh. Macfarlane is joining Flynn and his band on tour too. Flynn is being more selective about roles. “I haven’t been drawn to huge films where you shoot an eighth of a page a day; that feels like painting by numbers. Sometimes you have to pay the bills and agents say, ‘If you take this, it will get you exposure,’ but I find that cynical. If you feel jaded that does something to your soul, holding on to an idea of what this thing does for you in the future rather than enjoying the moment, and that is no way to live.”
The Motive and the Cue gave Flynn the chance to play Hamlet, “which I’ve always coveted, and I got to do it for my 40th birthday, which felt like a coming of age.” He looks embarrassed. “Sorry if I sound really wanky.” How does he feel about being in his forties? “It’s thrilling getting older. I don’t think I’d want to be in my twenties again. It was a necessary thing. I’d like to be cast as a dad.”
We return to Ripley and how Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, about the con artist Ripley, prefigured recent true crime scammer dramas about figures like Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes and the Tinder Swindler, which show how easily people can be seduced by something they want to believe is true. How far is this true with Greenleaf and Ripley?
“In some ways Dickie is willing to go along with Tom and gets something from him,” Flynn says. There’s a sexual tension between them too. “Tom thinks, why wouldn’t we act on something that gives us pleasure? But Dickie will never indulge fantasies about men. Patricia Highsmith was violently homophobic — it’s fascinating that she created Tom almost out of self-loathing, and he’s a character you root for even though he embodied a lot of things she detested. It’s a fascinating study of a certain type of person.”
Ripley is on Netflix now.
Written by: Susannah Butter
© The Times of London
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