How do you take on playing an actual legend? As David Bowie in new film Stardust, Johnny Flynn isn’t afraid of a challenge.
Words: Jamie MacMillan.
David Bowie would never have had to put up with this. ‘This’ being the usual bundle of chaos that Dork brings to any party. Because, while Johnny Flynn, the man responsible for bringing the icon back to life in the new biopic Stardust, sits comfortably in his home for our Zoom call, we’re squashed into the front of a parked van. Anywhere to get a signal. As the sun slowly starts to set, he squints into his monitor and asks quizzically “Where… are you?” Welcome to Planet Earth, Ziggy.
Telling the tale of a pre-fame (and pre-’Faaaaame’) Bowie, ‘Stardust’ acts as an origin story for his most famous creation Ziggy Stardust. Taking place during his 1971 tour-of-America-that-wasn’t-a-tour, many of the events almost feel apocryphal in the issues and obstacles facing him as he turns up in the country minus a visa, while also fighting to prove that he’s more than a one-hit-wonder. It’s a dark, distinctly unglamorous portrayal of life on the outskirts of a disinterested music industry - as Bowie and his put-upon publicist Ron Oberman (played by Glow’s Marc Maron) do their best, and equally their worst, at drumming up any press interest. Not so much ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ then, as ‘The Man Who No-One Cared About’. At times almost unrecognisable from the icon that was about to emerge, it was the chance to explore this largely unknown period in his career that appealed to Flynn the most in a dream, yet daunting, role. “I felt like this was a Bowie that you didn’t really know,” he begins. “At this point, he saw himself as a failure, he was desperately insecure, and it was really interesting to reframe my ideas about him.” It’s the genesis of a particular character whose shadow still hangs large over much of today’s music - your Creepers, your MCRs, even your Declans, all owe a huge debt to this metamorphosis that a slightly kooky guy from Brixton underwent.
