Johny Flynn: No Person Looks As If David Bowie!

The actor and player triggered a stir while he turned into forged as bowie in the drawing close biopic stardust. He tells Chris Harvey why the backlash disenchanted him, and why the final issue he wants is to make a film like bohemian rhapsody or rocketman.

I’m a very trusting person… and that I’m convinced that people are innately true,” says johnny Flynn, “however this era has been hard for that angle. I’ve been attacked online, sometimes pretty violently, human beings announcing, ‘permit’s cross and string up Johnny Flynn, permit’s go and beat up Johnny Flynn.’” his sin? Playing David Bowie in the unique film stardust.

Gabriel range’s low-key indie is a charming portrayal of bowie as a performer at the crossroads, arriving unheralded in the usa at the give up of January 1971 for a three-week promotional tour of the man who offered the sector. 

Flynn’s bowie is a changeable creature, still incubating as an artist, even as coming to terms with the reality that his 1/2-brother terry burns, who had been a primary have an effect on him, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and is being admitted for intervals to cane hill psychiatric medical institution in croydon, wherein he could later be confined until his suicide in 1985.

The fan backlash has been intense. Flynn, who changed into a captivating Mr. Knightley in Autumn de Wilde's 2019 edition of Austen's Emma, a show-stealing provocateur in martin mcdonagh’s acclaimed play hangmen, and nonetheless has an opportunity profession as a singer-songwriter with his very own band, the Sussex wit, has skilled complaint earlier than. But not anything like the abuse he’s faced since taking up the role of the loved and without end mythologized superstar.

“I'm pretty thick-skinned,” Flynn tells me, through zoom from his home in east London. “whilst you put a record out, for every eight human beings that love it, there’s gonna be two humans that really need you to recognize that they don’t love it. I’ve had to address that earlier than, when you’re thinking, ‘i’m no longer right here for you, I’m not trying to please you, you don’t have to buy a price ticket, you don’t have to buy the cd, you understand?’ I've gotten over that, philosophically.”

I’d heard him chatting to his co-superstar, stand-up Marc Maron (who plays bowie’s us publicist Ron Oberman), at the latter’s famous podcast wtf, approximately being visible as obese bowie, having no longer taken enough cocaine for the replacement. 

Yet he spent two stone for the role on an ultra-low-carb diet, even as nonetheless looking to work on any other film. “one of the things they are saying is, ‘he doesn’t appear like bowie.’ but no one seems like bowie! I imply, what do you need? Do you need me to have an operation?

“I always the idea, ‘i’m gonna work sincerely difficult at being the essence of David, and learn how to stroll and talk and sing like him, and shed pounds. But I’ll nonetheless have those cheekbones, those bones.’ and that I don’t definitely want it to be that type of pristine impersonation due to the fact first off, that’s not a soulful, inhabited actual overall performance necessarily. And that I’m now not an impersonator, I’m an actor.”