In the later afternoon dim, from a Williamsburg apartment in Brooklyn, overlooking an icy East River, Elliot Frances Flynn offers no cut and dry answers to the characters she plays, or writes about – and she likes it that way.
She says “there’s a really strange sort of thing happening,” in modern discourse. “This kind of belief that every character must act honorably at all times. If they make even one selfish decision, that means that they’re bad. I don’t think it’s reflective of our world, and I also don’t think it’s entertaining.”
Flynn’s the actress-filmmaker who’s storming screens with messy women who fuck up gloriously. She tends to play young women who are at once vulnerable and tough, often navigating trauma, coming-of-age transitions, or liminal “in-between” spaces in life and identity.
And lately, as writer-director of her debut short Baby Fat, the film that lands like a gut punch in a dark comedy.
Set in 2006 Rockland County, New York suburbs—Flynn’s own stomping grounds—it’s about a 13-year-old girl’s brutal fork: teacher’s pet or pint-sized hustler? Her friends hatch an after-school prostitution ring at the local ice cream shop, wielding misunderstood sexuality like a clumsy weapon, while she gets cold feet. “Our shorthand was, is she going to be a good girl or a slut?” Flynn says, noting she let her 13-year-old lead utter the s-word first. No explicit sex—just raw, eavesdropper dialogue, on a forbidden girl powwow.
“My goal with the film was just to kind of plop the viewer down into a moment in time that feels real and feels grounded, even though, I mean, their scheme is ridiculous,” she says.
Flynn insists it’s no endorsement, and not autobiography. “Being a teen is very hard, and blossoming into a sexual person is very confusing and it feels really icky,” she tells. Festivals have balked—too provocative, too real—but that’s the point. For Swagger viewers, she hopes it’s “entertainment with a side of new information,” with the potential to “take that glimpse of a private conversation and decide what they want to take from it.”
Behind the camera, Baby Fat surprised even her—”making a movie is so hard”—yet she’s scripting a yet-to-be announced follow up: “something sexy and dangerous and weird,” starring herself.
From shy, fantasy-obsessed kid in Orangeburg, New York to SUNY New Paltz grad with dual degrees in English and Digital Media, it’s clear Flynn’s flight path screams quirky zigzag, scribbling outside the margins.
Screen credits prove her range: New York Times Critic’s Pick “Linoleum,” (Jim Gaffigan); HBO’s Mare of Easttown, Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, Long Bright River, indie gem Shoplifters of the World, and award-hauling slasher short The Babysitter Murders (Timing’s Off) where she nabbed Best Actress. Then Peacemaker—her “sexy, high-profile debut” in DC’s wilds on HBO. As Zora, she’s “trouble looking for trouble. But in a fun way. She’s a good time gal,” joyous chaos amid John Cena’s orbit. “I loved working on Peacemaker. Being a small part of a world-famous DC machine is unbelievable,” she says. “When I’m not people like Zora, I am a wounded woman who is, you know, bruised in some way.”
The protagonists in her films, and the motivations behind them, are never just one thing—good or bad, slut or saint—but works in progress, mistakes and all. The through-line is that her characters carry a private complexity: they feel like people with off-screen lives, histories, and contradictions, not just functions in the plot.
Born to a trifecta of Italian-Irish-Russian ethnic gumbo, there’s plenty to culturally draw from.
“I’m Italian, and my Italian family members are very emotional. They’re very loving. They’re very doting. They’re the family members that cry at family gatherings, you know, because they’re just so moved. That is definitely something that exists in me. I cry all the time. Many of my characters also cry,” she says. “I see the Irish side of the family as people who keep to themselves, you know, something very polite, something very proper. And we’ll see how that manifests itself in my being, because I don’t consider myself a very proper person.”
A thesis advisor foresaw her “fun but also crazy,” prophecy for the off-kilter roles she craves. Trained at The Barrow Group – that count as alumni famed actors Anne Hathaway and Tony Hale – early on she blurred acting and writing, penning erotica and memoirish essays for niche publications. Blunt dispatches on “sex, shame, desire,” she says.
“I write about relationships. Those are the things that drive me,” she says. “Oftentimes when I read my work at open mics and at readings in the city, I’m hoping for that person who’s going to come up to me and say, like, ‘that’s so true.’”
With the topic of relationships, and an Instagram account that dilettantes on the subject, what advice would she offer the Swagger man to woo the ladies? “It’s all about the swagger,” she says, with intended wordplay. “Charisma. If you are confident in who you are it makes you magnetic.” Not cockiness—but self-assurance, thoughtfulness, that “allows everyone to be real.”
And then, there’s relationships of her own. Being one of identical triplets was as layered as her triplicate career of filmmaker, writer and actress. Childhood hell; adult jackpot, she says of her sibs. “Growing up it didn’t feel fun at all… if she’s the smart one, I have to be someone else,” she recalls. But now she has “two built-in best friends. There’s nothing I could say to them that they wouldn’t understand.”
Publicly, Flynn is edges and sex-soaked lines. Privately, she is still “figuring it out,” the memoirist who “keeps some things private and off the page” and doesn’t mind if strangers never get the full story, so long as the people who know her craft can see the care in her work.
“One day I’m sure someone will have negative things to say about what I write and how I do it,” she says. “But at this point, it doesn’t scare me because I do operate with intentionality, with sympathy, with care for myself and care for the people I’m writing about.”
Photos by McKenna Christine Poe