Brandon Flynn’s Next Steps

Many actors like to talk about how serious they are, but Brandon Flynn is not afraid to stress the importance of levity in his work as well. After a string of dark roles in hit series including True Detective, Ratched, Manhunt, and 13 Reasons Why, he says he was looking to expand his talents into comedy, which made the new Max film The Parenting the perfect project. A mix of horror and humor, the film revolves around a couple, played by Flynn and Nik Dodani, introducing their parents on the weekend the latter plans to propose. The picturesque house they rent, however, turns out to be haunted by a four-hundred-year-old demon, and jokes and jump scares ensue in equal measure. After a delay of a few years since its filming, its recent premiere has also come along at just the right time. “You always try to reason with yourself why something is happening in the way it’s happening, and I think its delayed release maybe is for the best,” Flynn says. “It seems like the response from an audience perspective right now is just, we could really use a laugh, and I’m really happy to be a part of a project that allows that to happen.”

Starring alongside an all-star cast including Brian Cox, Edie Falco, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, and Dean Norris, Flynn says he most appreciated the opportunity to try something new. “At that point, I hadn’t done a comedy like that and it was something I really wanted to see if I could do,” he explains. “I wanted a low-stakes opportunity to test out my comedic skills, and ultimately, it wasn’t low stakes, but it was very comfortable.” Supported by his fellow cast members, Flynn, a theater major with the curiosity of a lifelong student, felt comfortable stretching in unexplored directions. “You realize in those circumstances even people breaking while you’re in the scene is a form of support,” he laughs. “You’re like, ‘OK, what I’m doing is actually funny, now we just have to get through it together.’”

Part of the 31-year-old actor’s ease may have come from the immediate chemistry he had with his costars, especially Dodani, playing his boyfriend, and Kudrow and Norris, who played his parents. “It was just one of those really easy jobs in terms of everyone getting on with each other,” he says. “In many ways, I read that script and I was like, ‘Oh, these are my parents, they’re so open and free and say all the things that are coming to their mind.’ I’ve definitely had my parents at premieres and stuff where I’m like, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe you just said that,’ but also in complete adoration of the fact that that’s how they are, which really played into the relationship with my parents in that movie.”

Flynn’s latest project offered a refreshing change of pace as well. Earlier this year, he spent nearly two months on an Off Broadway stage right above 42nd Street, playing Marlon Brando to Robin Lord Taylor’s Tennessee Williams in Kowalski, about the fateful night the actor “auditioned” for his iconic role in A Streetcar Named Desire. The play, written Gregg Ostrin and directed by Colin Hanlon, a friend of Flynn’s who suggested the part, recounts the momentous first meeting between Brando and Williams, with the former arriving unannounced at the latter’s Provincetown home and equally impressing and insulting the playwright with his behavior. Flynn says he worked carefully to capture Brando’s physical presence and nasal voice without veering into impression. “I watched A Streetcar Named Desire, the film, and a couple different interviews with Brando and went and bought his book and just started becoming quickly obsessed,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can do this.’ It intrigued me to work with a friend. It felt like it was just going to be fun, which was something I was really interested in, having fun.”

Having spent nearly a decade performing in two or three plays a year first at Miami’s New World School of the Arts and then at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Flynn says he relished the opportunity to return to the New York stage, having last appeared in the musical Kid Victory in 2017. “It really is at my core what I love and what I instinctually want to do. I’m always grateful when the opportunity arises to be back on stage and share that community and that experience with a live audience,” he says. “The film and TV industry, it is what it is right now and I’m happy to get involved, but also sometimes it does feel like a bit of a paycheck. I was really craving this back-to-roots experience with my craft.”

Flynn has come a long way since his stage debut at the age of ten playing Mr. Smee in a school production of Peter Pan. Even then, it was clear he never missed an opportunity to push himself. “I took a pillow from my house and my mom’s reading glasses and came to class and shoved the pillow up my shirt and put the reading glasses and did a little crouch and a voice,” he recalls. “I remember the teacher singling me out and being like, ‘This is how you do this,’ and I was just like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, so please elaborate.’” In middle school, his parents encouraged him to enroll in the drama elective, which proved to be a formative experience for him both professionally and personally. “I was made fun of by so many kids in school,” he says. “It was tumultuous. Also trying to reckon with my sexuality, I knew something was going on. I didn’t quite have the experiences or the words to figure it out, but was being told by other kids who I was and what I was. I really found a family in that drama program, and I really found an outlet for all the big feelings I had.”

After his move to a conservatory for high school and drama school for college, Flynn landed the role of the troubled high school jock Justin in the Netflix sensation 13 Reasons Why about a month after graduating. Even five years on from its finale, he is still best known to many for the series, which helped jumpstart his career and continues to shape his reputation to this day. Now at the beginning of his thirties, he says he has lately been asking himself where he sees himself in the decades to come. “Inside of me are still all those big emotions that I was talking about earlier. When I watched The Parenting, I was like, ‘Hmm, is this the kind of actor I want to be?’” he says. “This question is interesting because the last couple days I’ve been figuring out what’s the next manifestation. I think the short answer is, I want to continue to do it all. I believe in myself that I can do it all.”

To that end, he’s currently at work on an adaptation of Gary Indiana’s novel Rent Boy, about an escort who finds himself involved in an organized crime ring, which he has been writing and plans to direct. “I connected to it deeply, what it feels like sometimes as an actor to sort of be a rent boy and sort of be a hustler,” he says. “That feels like a big drive for me to want to direct, so I can create a story instead of just being the vessel in which I’m being told how to create the story. Rent Boy felt incredibly poignant in that respect.”

As a vocal advocate of LGBTQ+ issues and Black Lives Matter, Flynn is contending with the power of his platform offscreen as well. Pointing to Brando, a passionate supporter of the civil rights movement, he says that artists have a unique role to play in social discourse. “I do think that we have a job to be outspoken,” he explains. “There’s something with social media that has really shaped how artists are able to point to specific directions for people and uplift voices that have years and peers behind them. As much as artists have this specific lens on things, we are also, especially Hollywood, very privileged. I think it’s important to point to the direction of outspoken people who have really made it their life’s purpose to understand and dissect the political nuance that we’re in.”

But for Flynn, the focus remains on the work, in whatever format, genre, or medium that might be. “I think so many actors get stuck doing one thing over and over and over again. I desperately don’t want that. I think that would get incredibly boring and taxing,” he says. “Some part of this job needs to remain fun for it to feel worth it. But I do hope my legacy involves like the idea that, ‘Look how many different things he can do.’” With Kowalski on his mind, he adds, “At the core of what I was playing, he was a young actor really wanting to sink his teeth in and get going in his career. I can really relate to that emotional life.”

The Parenting is now streaming on Max.