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. Later, he lovingly feeds his enemy’s dogs a tea-dunked ginger biscuit before spraying them with bullets.
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.
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.
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