Biography
As a successful poet, musician and actor Johnny Flynn offered an impressive, if slightly unconventional, triple threat. The son of actor Eric Flynn, Johnny was born in South Africa but moved to the U.K. as a child. After earning a music scholarship, he joined the Winchester College Chapel choir and played trumpet and violin at school. After buying The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Flynn taught himself to play guitar. Inspired by New York's vibrant antifolk movement Flynn started a similar club, Apocalypso, on his return to London alongside fellow musicians Emmy the Great and Tom Hatred. Away from music, he continued to pursue acting making his TV debut in in "Murder in Suburbia" (ITV, 2004-05) followed by "Holby City" (BBC, 1999-) and the lead in feature film "Crusade in Jeans" (2006). He found work with all-male theatre company Propeller, starring in their 2007 productions of "The Taming of the Shew" and "Twelfth Night," and went on to name his first album A Larum (2008) after a Shakespearean term. He continued to combine music and acting, touring with Mumford & Sons and alternating between albums and film work. Combining both his passions by composing the score to indie comedy "A Bag of Hammers" (2011), he went on to star opposite Anne Hathaway in "Song One" (2014), naturally enough playing a musician, and appeared opposite Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas' "Clouds of Sil Maria" (2015). Back on U.K. TV he took the lead in quirky sitcom "Lovesick" (Channel 4, 2014-) alongside devising the theme tune and making a cameo appearance in "Detectorists" (BBC, 2014-15). Flynn also appeared on the sitcom "Brotherhood" (Comedy Central 2015), co-starred as the young Albert Einstein in the miniseries "Genius" (National Geographic 2017-18), and appeared in a miniseries adaptation of the novel "Vanity Fair" (ITV 2018). During this period, he also released the 2017 album Sillion. In early 2019, Flynn was announced as the star of David Bowie biopic "Starman" (2020).
