Johnny Flynn on His New Drama ’Prayer for the Dying’ and Musical Friendship With Co-Star John C. Reilly: ‘We Actually Sang a Lot Together’

variety.com:

Carole Horst Johnny Flynn’s career has taken him from Regency England (“Emma,” “Vanity Fair”) to WWII (“Operation Mincemeat”) to contempo Glasgow (“Lovesick”) to mid-century Italy (“Ripley”) to 1971 David Bowie (“Stardust”), and now the versatile actor-singer-songwriter travels to post Civil War America in “A Prayer for the Dying.” Adapted from the novel by Stewart O’Nan and directed by Dara Van Dusen, the drama unfolds in 1870 Wisconsin, in a small town of Scandinavian settlers who face a chillingly timely threat of a pandemic and wildfires.

Flynn plays Jacob Hansen, the local sheriff and town leader, and John C. Reilly co-stars as the town’s doctor. Anton and New Europe Films are handling worldwide rights, and Anton will be debuting a new sales promo at EFM. What drew you to “A Prayer for the Dying”? It felt like a very rare project and a very rare story that needed telling.

The novel is actually quite slim — I pretty much read it in a day, which never happens with me, because I’m a slow reader. And it just sucked me in. Even though it’s set in the late 1800s, what was it about the story that resonated with you? There’s the sort of urgency and the poignancy around contemporary issues, and once you get through the novel, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, this is the same stuff.” This is very, very human.

And it is in lots of ways, it’s like humanity meets a cold, an indifferent environment. It’s actually based on the book of Job.Is your character Job-like? The story of Job is, for me, one of the most problematic and weird stories in the Bible — having to be a leader of a community, and having to be there till the end, despite everything happening to him in a very brutal way, and still having faith and faith in leadership —.