3 min read 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 ma...