The first time we meet Frankie Cooper, MobLand season 2’s psychotic new villain, he’s tenderly barbecuing steak in a Hawaiian shirt. The next, he’s having a pedicure in a nail bar, lecturing another villain about his onychomycosis. “That’s ‘fungus’ to the layman,” he drawls. Later, he lovingly feeds his enemy’s dogs a tea-dunked ginger biscuit before spraying them with bullets. “Simple pleasures,” he muses, looking over their bloodied corpses.
It’s all thanks to actor Johnny Flynn, who is showcasing the most gleefully unhinged performance on TV this year—and he looks like he’d do it for free. Though the actor is used to playing silver-spooned aristotwats—like Mr. Knightley in Jane Austen’s Emma or George Mallory in Tenzing—Frankie Cooper is truly something else. He’s irresistibly creepy, laconically camp, oddly charming, and deranged enough to bite off your fingers one by one for turning him down.
At first, Cooper seemed as if Mobland Frankenstein’ed together Rhys Ifans’s Spike in Notting Hill and Ben Kingsley’s Don “Yes you fucking will” Logan in Sexy Beast. But by episode 2, the villain evolved. His stare grew longer and leerier. The Hawaiian shirt turned into a matching tracksuit under a sheepskin coat. Plus, there was the medieval-squire hairdo: long at the back, fringe-heavy, the cut of a man who’s never heard the word “No.”
After episode 3, it hit me. What’s most sinister about Frankie Cooper isn’t just the childlike insouciance of Rhys Ifans, or the bullish venom of Ben Kingsley. It’s not even the dollop of Heath Ledger’s Joker combed through. When I squint and tilt my head, he’s just a northern accent and a “Now then” short of Jimmy Savile.
Johnny Flynn stars in MobLand season 2 as Frankie Cooper.
Is there a spookier, more deranged, monstrous psychopath locked inside England’s collective consciousness? A man so totally reviled that he has become shorthand for the rot behind a nation’s Saturday night TV? Viewers may recall another villain that borrowed the famous media personality’s personage earlier this year, when Jack O’Connell styled his 28 Years Later cult after the TV host with a history of sexual abuse allegations. And now here is Frankie Cooper, in a tracksuit and a shaggy mane, wearing that same grinning, hiding-in-plain-sight, flinty-eyed bonhomie like it’s his second skin.
In episode 6, the way Frankie reaches down to touch Colin Tattersall’s crotch, to check that he does, indeed, get a hard-on when a gun’s held to his head, is so reptilian that it’s unmistakably Savilian. Then, with relish, a smile creeps across his face as he wheezes a cackle and leers: “You dirty rotter. Like Brighton Rock. Shame on me. I like you, Colin. I do.”
What about the way he orders Donnie to kidnap Jan later in the same episode: “Either you deliver this bitch to me today, or, Kat or no Kat, I’m gonna find you,” he says. “And when I do, we’re gonna take off all our clothes and have a wrestle. The winner’s gonna get to keep their balls, eyes, liver, kidneys and all the other boy’s marbles. Are you in? Splendid.”
I’m mindful not to overdo the comparison. Frankie Cooper is not a carbon copy of Savile, and to reduce him to mimicry would do a disservice to Flynn’s gloriously idiosyncratic creation. Because, unlike Savile, Cooper is properly funny. But Flynn has borrowed just enough of the man to imbue him with enough dead-eyed Savilian energy to make the flesh creep and the cigar-smoke-and-sherbet-lemon memories of 1970s Saturday nights curdle on the mind’s tongue.
In MobLand, Flynn’s created a villain for our times, and I crave more of it—like onychomycosis craves a moist sock. Simple pleasures, indeed.