ACNE STUDIOS top, JW ANDERSON trousers. Photographed by Damian Foxe for the March 2025 Issue of Vogue Man Philippines
Eight years after becoming a star on the hit Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, Brandon Flynn is hitting his stride, earning the best reviews of his career playing Marlon Brando onstage. Up next? He’s writing his own future.
Nina Simone’s “Since I Fell For You” is playing on the radio when I’m beckoned to meet Brandon Flynn in the bedroom.
It’s an unseasonably warm winter afternoon in the penthouse suite of a nautical-inspired Chelsea hotel; capiz lamps overhead, steel anchors on the fireplace and porthole-like windows overlooking Manhattan, and the 31-year-old is dressed in a ribbed white tank, scruffy dark jeans and brogues. Dressed like this, he could be a member of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, the gang Marlon Brando’s Johnny Strable leads in the 1953 classic The Wild One. It seems apt.
Flynn is currently in the middle of an acclaimed run as the young Marlon Brando in the Off-Broadway production Kowalski, a new play by Gregg Ostrin that spins out a compelling, only somewhat-factual dramedy out of an anecdote regarding Brando’s first meeting with the playwright Tennessee Williams. As the legend goes, in 1947, a pre-fame Brando was given USD 20 by the director Elia Kazan to travel to Provincetown and audition for the part that would eventually make him a star; Stanley Kowalski in Williams’s masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire.
In taking on the challenge of playing perhaps the most influential actor of our time, Flynn has received some of the best reviews of his career, earning raves from the New York Times and the New York Theatre Guide. While audiences may know him best from the hit Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, the project is in some ways, a kind of homecoming for the theater-trained Flynn.
“I spent most of my teenage years and my young adult years training to be an actor at conservatory,” he says. “I feel like I’m really able to access a lot of that technique with this [play] in creating a character… Right now, I feel like I’m really getting the opportunity to physically and vocally make shifts and make them feel natural. It’s a different muscle than what I’ve done.”
It’s not surprising why Flynn gravitated toward this role. In early interviews, he routinely shouted out 1950s leading men like Montgomery Clift and James Dean as his heroes, Lee Strasberg-trained method actors who helped shift screen acting away from the broad gesticulations of the studio star system and into something more naturalistic. Clift and Brando, of course, were also later revealed to be queer.
“I mean, [Brando was] in an interview saying, ‘Yes, I’ve slept with men. Yes, I’ve slept with women. What’s the big deal?’; which was quite remarkable,” Flynn says. “I mean, same with Tennessee Williams. He was quite remarkably out.”
Flynn has similarly always been open about his sexuality; still not the norm in an industry that rarely gives lead roles to out queer actors. Sometimes, he wonders if that candidness has cost him opportunities. “My career, I’m assuming, looks a certain way because I am an out actor. How many of us are working at a high level?”
But Flynn has no regrets. “There’s still a lot more that I want to do,” he says. “I don’t always feel like I’m in the room for those conversations. But I’m very optimistic that there’s plenty of time.”
Up next, audiences will see Flynn in The Parenting, a horror comedy about a young gay couple (Flynn and Nik Dodani) who host a weekend getaway with their parents in a too-good-to-be-true country house that turns out to be haunted. Flynn’s and Dodani’s parents are played by legends like Brian Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Edie Falco and Dean Norris. Parker Posey, who plays Victoria Ratliff herself from the latest season of The White Lotus, has a memorable role as an eccentric groundskeeper who keeps them in the property.
Flynn learned a lot on the set, watching those veterans work. “It was like watching a master class,” he says. “They each had their things that I walked away thinking, ‘I need to do that. I need to use that.’”
“There’s still a lot more that I want to do. I don’t always feel like I’m in the room for those conversations. But I’m very optimistic that there’s plenty of time.”
In this next chapter of his career, Flynn is taking matters into his own hands. Right now, he’s working on getting a film adaptation of the late great Gary Indiana’s novel Rent Boy off the ground. The book, a noir about a sex worker’s adventures through New York nightlife that touches on everything from organ theft to murder, is hardly the kind of project one would identify with a heartthrob who initially found fame on a teen show but it’s clear he’s eager to take big swings.
“I realize I’m a 31-year-old man who still gets carded and I look young and I don’t necessarily want to keep playing young roles. I want to play adult roles and be in adult films,” he says.
Flynn was able to get Indiana’s blessing before the legendary writer passed away last year. He’s currently finalizing the screenplay and is hoping to direct the feature.
Around three years ago, Flynn read the novel for the first time and was so struck by it that he immediately read it again. “I called my agents and was like, ‘Can we find out about the rights to this book? I think it’d make an excellent movie.’” Later, a friend of his now-husband Jordan Tannahill, the playwright and author behind The Listeners, told them that she was good friends with Indiana and could broker an introduction.
Flynn and Indiana immediately struck up a warm friendship. “He was right around the corner from me [in the East Village],” he says. “So I would go over to his apartment. He really didn’t want to be involved with the adaptation. We agreed. We signed a contract, it was great. We talked about a couple of things, but he was like, ‘I don’t have any interest to write this.’ That was always my responsibility. He was just like, ‘I’ll talk to you about the places that are mentioned,’ because they’re all so specific to the ‘90s in New York that half of them don’t exist anymore. But we just became pals.”
As both an artist and as a gay man, Flynn considers that friendship a precious gift. “It was one of the coolest things that has happened [to me],” Flynn says. “And hopefully, Rent Boy can get made and it can just be another gift for Gary as well.”
By RAYMOND ANG. Photographs by DAMIAN FOXE. Vogue Man Editor DANYL GENECIRAN. Styling by ELAD BRITTON. Talent: Brandon Flynn. Casting & Production: Daniele Carettoni at Espresso Productions. Hair: Gonn Kinoshita at The Wall Group. Skin: Sandrine Van Slee at Art Department. Digital and Lighting: Adam DiCarlo. Fashion Assistant: Eden Molen. On-Set Fashion Assistant: Madison Perez. Retouching: Love Retouch. Shot on location at The Maritime Hotel NYC.
