Johnny Flynn says it was “great” to be killed off in Ripley, but his character Dickie Greenleaf may disagree.
British actor Flynn joined his co-stars in Italy for pre-production and rehearsals for the Steve Zaillian-directed Netflix series, but then flew home once the cameras started rolling. Co-star Andrew Scott and others were supposed to pick things up later in the series after Dickie’s death in episode 3, and when Flynn returned, things would pick up with his fateful boat scene. .
“I love technology, the technical side of filmmaking. I’ve never been in a sequence as technical as this,” Flynn said during a meeting with Zaillian and the cast after an advance screening of Episodes 1-3 in New York. He spoke at a panel discussion. city. “That was kind of one of the first things we did because we were putting things in the tanks and then they knew what they needed to get out to sea. So it was really hard for us to deal with that as well.”
Most of the boat scenes (some in a tank with green screens, some at sea) required Flynn to lie motionless as Dickie’s corpse after a carefully choreographed fight scene ( “Everyone was screaming at me when I started moving”) with Scott. But even after Dickie’s death, the character still carries weight. He dies at the end of Episode 3 of the eight-episode series, and his murder sets everything else in motion.
“I knew I was going to die, because I was already done,” Flynn said of filming the remaining scenes. “It actually gave me something beautiful. [exquisite] The inevitability of aspects of death and the duration of key parts of my journey through the story. And because this story is from Tom’s point of view…it’s almost sacrificial—this totemic moment in the story is the big one that everything spirals into. It was great to be aware of that. ”
The end of Dickie’s life, beyond the ubiquitous murders, does not mean the end of his appearance on the series. Tom begins to have visions and dreams in which Dickie’s body rises to the surface or his eyes open below the surface, and he “dreams and imagines what condition he is in at this moment.” These scenes were filmed in the real ocean, with underwater cameras and divers pulling Flynn up and down on a pulley system between takes.
“At some point, someone came up to me and said, ‘I think you can do that with AI,’ and I was like, ‘Thank you, fuck!'” Flynn said of the flapping motion from the ground. He imitated the performance while laughing and telling the audience. “I’d come up for some air and they’d say, ‘And come back!'” And when the strike happened last year, he of Points was one of: [AI taking over], I was the only one who said, “No, AI is good!” sometimes. ”
“Ripley” is now available on Netflix.