“I loved history at school, but it was always the Romans, the Tudors and World War Two on rotation,” he laughs. “At least that launched me into adult life with a will to join the dots and acting allows me to live it all from the inside. I spent about two years living in 1815 with [roles in screen adaptations of] Vanity Fair, Les Misérables and Emma. It gave me a nuanced perspective of the dawn of the modern age: an obsession with manners and class; horrific and banal societal constraints; gross conflict in the name of honour, disgusting divisions of wealth… So not that much has changed!”
Flynn is interested in the “ghosts of ancient civilisations” he sees in the landscape. During lockdown he teamed up with nature writer Robert Macfarlane to write a witty album called Lost in the Cedar Wood loosely based on the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. He’s performing it live on tour later this month and admits he’s unsure whether we should be spending our time talking about that, Operation Mincemeat or his other new film, a tense gangster thriller called The Outfit, in which he appears as a steel-jawed Chicago tough guy opposite Mark Rylance’s meticulous tailor to the mob.
For a man who gives the impression of meandering through life, Flynn turns out to be astonishingly productive. “It just looks like that because of the way projects come out,” he says, grinning. “I finished filming Operation Mincemeat in 2020. Back then, war seemed so distant…”
Having said that, Flynn admits he’s had a sense that trouble was coming for some time. While co-writing Magnitsky, a satirical musical about Putin and Russian money-laundering for Radio 3 in 2019, he says he “read a lot about the Putinocracy. I was so shocked by what I discovered and now we’re seeing it play out…” he sighs. “Putin’s been using corkscrew thinking against us for a long time now, with the disinformation around Trump’s election and Brexit.” And, just like the Germans buying into the faked letters of Operation Mincemeat, Flynn says, “the West swallowed it”.
Operation Mincemeat is out on Friday. The Outfit is in cinemas now. For Lost in the Cedar Wood live dates, see johnny-flynn.com
