The musician turned actor takes on his biggest role to date: legendary actor Richard Burton, in Sam Mendes’s new National Theatre play The Motive and the Cue
Johnny Flynn is almost certainly the only buzzy ’00s indie folk musician to have successfully reinvented himself as an in-demand screen actor and heavyweight theatre leading man. He’s not done a play since he starred opposite Kit Harington in 2018’s West End hit ‘True West’, but now he returns with the biggest role of his career: as superstar Richard Burton in Jack Thorne’s Sam Mendes-directed National Theatre play ‘The Motive and the Cue’, which details the fraught rehearsals for Welsh acting titan Burton’s starring role in a 1964 Broadway direction of ‘Hamlet’. Mark Gatiss stars as Burton’s director and idol John Gielgud, with Tuppence Middleton as his even more famous wife, Elizabeth Taylor.