Harry Potter and MobLand star Johnny Flynn talks "strange" gangster role, playing Lucius Malfoy and "posh boys taking over things"

MobLand might mean disaster for Johnny Flynn’s plan to avoid fame. “I’ve turned roles down because I thought there was a risk that they would turn me into a star,” he says, looking a little gloomy after I point out his bravura performance as gangster-come-chiropodist Frankie near-guarantees stardom.

The actor calls Paramount’s hit London gangster show “the most entertaining TV I’ve ever seen” and, as the 26 million viewers around the world who watched the first series are discovering, Flynn makes series two even better.

“He is strange and mercurial,” he says of Frankie, the London druglord who comes up against Tom Hardy’s Harrigan family enforcer Harry da Souza. “I wanted the energy of Michael Caine in Get Carter. I love how Carter uses his wit and intelligence; he doesn’t look like he goes to the gym.” Neither does Frankie, who carries several extra pounds beneath his velour track suit. “He’s lugubrious,” Flynn observes. “Like a fat cat.”

To bulk up for Frankie, the 43-year-old actor, previously seen as George Knightley in Emma and Dickie Greenleaf in Ripley, stopped playing tennis and started having “an extra sandwich”. The resulting character, complete with a page-boy haircut, is both theatrically sinister and believably threatening, which is exactly why Flynn worries about stardom.

“I rarely go on a red carpet because if somebody sees me and thinks, ‘That’s Johnny Flynn, he wears a suit that looks like that…’ then they won’t be able to use their imagination as actively when they see me in something. Also, I’m quite shy. If I have to go on chat shows, I get terrible panic attacks.”

Such shyness is a surprising revelation in a man who does so many public-facing things. Alongside his screen work, Flynn leads the folk band Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit with his sister Lillie, and wrote the songs for The Detectorists and Digging for Britain. He is also an acclaimed stage actor and, appeared in MobLand writer Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem in 2011.

That relationship led to Flynn playing Frankie. “Jez called me up and said, ‘Have you seen MobLand?’ I didn’t know anything about it, so I watched it and realised it’s a masterpiece. The writing is incredible, like something from Homer. It has a mythic level with archetypal characters and storytelling.”

When we first encounter the uncomfortably menacing Frankie he’s examining the bare feet of Colin Tattersall, played by Toby Jones, the corrupt policeman who is using him against the Harrigan family. “The scenes with Toby are sexually ambiguous and wonderfully eerie,” Flynn observes. That eeriness is added to by the frisson of sociopathic violence Frankie carries with him. Flynn “adopted this energy” in the weeks before filming. “Not in a dangerous way, going around killing people,” he says. “But you want to live in that body for a little bit, walk around the park like a Gallagher brother. You know, have some of that swagger.”

Flynn admits it’s a reach being “somebody as different from me as Frankie”. He was born in South Africa in 1983, son of actor Eric Flynn and ceramicist Caroline Forbes. Flynn, whose half-brother is actor Jerome Flynn, moved to England when he was three. “An article once called me a semi-posh post-colonialist,” he says. “My friend read it out loud, and we fell over laughing.”

But critics might have a point about the colonising; Flynn went to public school, as did Hardy and the show’s executive producer Guy Ritchie. “The posh boys taking over things is such an important conversation to have,” he concedes. “It’s terrible when the only stories being told are by the same set of public school guys. But those people that were probably being targeted, like Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch, they’re the nicest people I know, and they would say, ‘Yeah, we don’t want to be the only ones here.’”

Flynn points out that his life hasn’t always felt privileged. His father died when he was only 18. “All I inherited from my dad when he died was a little bit of debt and the Casio watch he wore.”

Before that, he was sent to a boarding school at seven (he had a choral scholarship to the Pilgrims’ School in Winchester) and was badly bullied. “It was quite traumatic for me,” he says. “I think they should all be burnt to the ground, I don’t think private schools should exist.”

Being separated from his sister and family caused the young Flynn to “develop little nervous tics”. Years later, he realised the psychological and emotional burden was still there.

“I suddenly thought, God, there’s something quite painful about this.” Consequently, Flynn went into “brilliant” therapy. “I learnt there was something called boarding school syndrome,” he says. “And I’m good, I’m OK now.”

Soon we will see Flynn’s return to boarding school, as wizard Lucius Malfoy in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter adaptation. That part was played in the films by Jason Isaacs, who told RT last year that he saw the Muggle-hating Malfoy “as a cowardly racist who’s trying to make the old world great again”. Flynn feels differently. “Jason is brilliant. He has a moral compass that shows him his true north and he underlined the themes of racism. Not to denounce his version, but I can’t play a character unless I empathise with them.”

Flynn has been criticised by some pro-trans activists for working with JK Rowling but says he doesn’t like talking about the politics around his projects. “Of course I have feelings about that, but I want to talk about the gratitude I feel at being able to do what I do.”

He took on the show to please his children (he has three with theatre designer Beatrice Minns) and because of his relationship with Rowling’s writing. “I came into it from the perspective of being a fan. I was around 10 or 11 when the first book came out. By the time the last was published I was graduating from drama school and hiding it behind a book of poetry to look cool.”

Want to see this content?

This page contains content provided by Google reCAPTCHA. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as Google reCAPTCHA may use cookies and other technologies. To view this content, choose 'Accept and continue' to allow Google reCAPTCHA and its required purposes.

Flynn’s education got brighter in its later stages. He got into the arts-orientated public school Bedales on a music scholarship. Lily Allen was there at the same time, and he met his future wife, Minns. “She came to sixth form. It was a mixed boarding house, but there’s the girls on one level and the boys on the other, with the doors locked at night. People found ways of climbing over and all that mischief made us feel like we were Harry, Hermione and Ron – but we had cans of cider shoved down our trousers.”

Rowling’s books gave him a lifeline but also a focus for the empathy that makes him a good actor. When he was 11, Flynn already knew the key to Malfoy’s character. “He was one of those kids bullied in his school, and he’s now turned into the bully, so he doesn’t know another way.

“That’s how I want to play him because I know those people quite well. On the one hand, they were the people that bullied me, they were the abusers, but at some point, they were the abused. So, nobody’s outright good or bad in the world.” Apart, perhaps, from Frankie.

The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday – subscribe here.

MobLand series 2 is on Friday 18 September on Paramount+

Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast