Johnny Flynn's habit is to look like the safe pair of hands and then make you wonder how safe. In One Life we got the first half of that: a decent, well-fitted turn in an ordinary film. The second half, by most accounts, is where he is interesting.
Fi1m perspective
In One Life (2023) Johnny Flynn plays the young Nicholas Winton in round spectacles, with good manners and a stockbroker's head for forms, and what he does for most of the film is fill things in correctly. He does not raise his voice. He deals with committees and paperwork and gets them right, and James Hawes's film asks him to make that enough. It is a plain performance in the plainest strand of the film, and we found the 1938 scenes ordinary and him well cast in them. We believed him more than we expected to, and it was the manners that did it: Flynn plays decency as a set of habits rather than a feeling, and the film is steadier for it.
He came to the screen sideways, from music and from the stage, with Propeller's Shakespeare productions, the RSC and Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem in 2011 and 2012 behind him before film paid much attention. His early screen parts, from the mid-2000s, were lighter, Crusade in Jeans (2006) among them, and most critics file that stretch as the sunny young man period that held him back. He has said as much himself: "I started playing morally dubious characters a few years ago, and it was such a relief, as I'd [previously] gone down the route of always being chosen to be the youthful, sunny type…" Beast (2018), as Pascal Renouf, is where the reviews date the change. What followed was a run of period and historical work: George Knightley in Emma. (2020), Rory Lomax in The Dig (2021), Operation Mincemeat (2022), One Life, and Dickie Greenleaf in Ripley (2024). He has worked twice with Mark Rylance. He still goes back to the theatre, most recently in The Motive and the Cue, and still makes records.
What critics keep noticing, and what we noticed in One Life, is attention to detail: the spectacles, the posture, the courtesy that never slips. The consensus also credits him with a sense of danger under the charm, and with carrying a stage actor's concentration onto screen without the volume, Ripley being the case most often cited. The Winton part used the first of those and had no call for the second. That is the risk of the run he has been on: the good wool coat becomes casting shorthand, and an actor whose reputation rests on not being quite trustworthy keeps being cast as the one you can trust. The music is not a sideline either. He composed for Detectorists and takes parts that involve song, and he releases albums between films.
& Sons (2025), as Richard Dyer, is next, another ensemble with a large cast. If you know him only as Winton, the young man doing his sums, the one to try next is Beast, and go in not knowing which sort of Flynn you are getting. That is the point of him.
Biography
Johnny Flynn is a South African-born British actor and musician. He played Young Nicholas Winton in the 2023 film One Life.
He is known for roles including George Knightley in Emma. (2020), David Bowie in Stardust (2020), Rory Lomax in The Dig (2021), Francis in The Outfit (2022), Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat (2022) and Dickie Greenleaf in the series RIPLEY (2024). On television he starred as Dylan Witter in the sitcom Lovesick (2014–2018).
Flynn is the lead singer and songwriter of the band Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit. His father was the actor Eric Flynn.
