The Great & The Good: Jerome Flynn

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Jerome was born in Kent, about seven miles from Sevenoaks, within easy reach of acres of wild woods where he and his brother and sister spent hours after school exploring, climbing trees and making camps, or helping with the vegetable garden or chopping wood to heat the house. Their mother, Fern, loved animals and, as a family, they kept a succession of injured animals in the house until they were well enough to go back outside.

“My mum rescued the injured and orphaned fox cubs, kestrels, a stoat, or a donkey. Cats, too. We lived in the beautiful Kentish countryside and took in fox cubs whose parents had been killed by farmers. We once took in four fox cubs from one family and, after a year or so, slowly introduced them back to the wild. At first, they would disappear for days and then turn up for some food. To this day, when I visit my mum, I walk those woods and fields and sometimes glimpse or smell a fox and consider the likelihood of them being great-grandchildren of our beloved clan. My animal friends were not only a source of delight and playful companionship, they taught me about love and letting go and they helped me understand my connection to, and place in, nature.”

Jerome’s mother’s close connection with wild animals led to his lifelong love for animals and a commitment to protecting farmed animals from cruelty. He is a staunch advocate for the highest possible welfare for farmed animals that are too often confined in overcrowded sheds with no grass under their feet or sky over their heads. Pigs in factory farms are so unhealthy and stressed that they need routine antibiotics just to keep them alive, leading to antibiotic-resistant diseases that pass to humans.

For years Jerome has been a supporter and spokesman for Farms Not Factories, and has been actively promoting our campaigns to raise awareness of the ghastly conditions that pigs have to endure in factory farms. In 2017 he presented our series of short films, called Game of Farms; The Mega-Farms are Coming, to help local people in N Ireland resist plans to build what would have been the largest factory pig farm in the UK at Limavady, and which would have polluted the protected Roe Valley and Lough Foyle shoreline.

The films focus on the harmful impacts on wildlife, antibiotic overuse, river pollution, local economies and on the pristine landscapes that he came to love while filming Game of Thrones in the area over many years. Thankfully, because of the dedicated campaign by local residents, and the powerful opposition to the scheme by Jerome, the developers at Limavady withdrew their application.

“Factory Farming is one of the most horrific examples of how far we have strayed from our hearts in the relentless drive for profit and so called progress. We call on all our major retailers to do the right thing and lead the way by ceasing to trade in any meat that isn’t high welfare. If we are going to farm and take the lives of our animals, then it is our responsibility to honour and care deeply for their lives while they are here, by giving them space to play and roam happily. I call on anyone with a compassionate heart to send a strong message to our government and our supermarkets by refusing to buy any factory farmed meat! It’s a horror story that has to stop!”

When Jerome was sixteen, his older brother Daniel was directing a production of The Crucible at Sevenoaks Youth Theatre, and when the lead dropped out, Daniel asked Jerome to play John Proctor. The experience of being on the stage suited him very well. “Girls showed more interest in me than they had before, and at the time that alone seemed a good enough reason for giving it a go.” The following year he started a three-year acting course at the Central School of Speech and Drama in Swiss Cottage.

In the late 1980s, Jerome was cast as Corporal Paddy Garvey in a series called Soldier, Soldier, a show that the whole cast and crew were convinced was going to be a spectacular flop. Not so, it was a huge success with viewing figures peaking at 16 million, and Episode 9 led to an unexpected singing career for Jerome and his fellow-actor, Robson Green who played Tucker. In the episode, the band that was booked to play at their Commanding Officer’s wedding reception fails to turn up, so Paddy and Dave Tucker step up and sing a few favourites including ‘Unchained Melody’.

When the episode was broadcast, ITV was inundated by calls from people asking if the song was going to be released as a single. Then the music producer Simon Cowell persuaded Jerome and Robson to record it and release it as a single with ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ on the B side. It was an instant, massive hit, and reached number one in the UK chart in 1995 where it stayed for 7 weeks, selling more than 1.9 million copies and making it the best-selling single of the year. The duo had two more number one hits in 1995 and also produced two number one albums, generating handsome royalties resulting in Jerome donating £27,000 to support Greenpeace, whose values he shares to this day.

Watch the Official Video of the chart hit, which is ingeniously intercut with scenes from Brief Encounter with actors, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.

In the late nineties, on the back of his singing success, Jerome bought a crumbling, romantic Georgian manor house looking over Cardigan Bay in Pembrokeshire.

“I am lucky enough to have wild creature companions on my coastal doorstep: sea birds, peregrines and buzzards, the occasional porpoise or dolphin, and seals. Encounters with wild animals are precious gifts.”

In 2010 he auditioned for a part in Game of Thrones, turning up for the audition with a black eye from when he banged his head in his brother’s kitchen the day before. He insists that this gave him a rough look which got him the part as Bronn, a rugged and feared swordsman. He put on a Scottish accent for the audition thinking this would reinforce his hard man image, but the producers decided that he should speak with a jaunty Northern English accent instead. He was given the part which kept him busy filming 38 episodes over the following eight years.

After filming Game of Thrones, he was able to use his mighty fame to help Farms Not Factories promote our campaign Pigs in Chains about the stranglehold supermarkets have on our pig farmers. We bought single shares in Tesco, Domino’s, Sainsbury’s and Greggs and crashed their AGMs, haranguing their CEOs and top directors about their irresponsible and unethical policies of sourcing factory farmed pork. Because of shareholder laws they had to listen to our complaints and were supposed to respond in writing, something they never got round to.

With a pink pig costumed colleague, we filmed outside supermarkets with Jerome asking people as they came out whether they were happy that the supermarket was sourcing factory farmed pork, showing them pictures of pigs in green grassy fields compared with those in barren, overcrowded concrete sheds. The customers either walked straight past us or stopped to tell us why it was wrong. Outside Tesco, we filmed a group of students who said they would never buy factory farmed pork, apart from one who said that as the pigs were going to die anyway it didn’t make much difference. Watch Jerome’s inspired response.

In December 2019 the leaders of the protest movement run by local residents resisting the factory pig farm at Limavady, came to the House of Commons to lobby MPs at a meeting organised by Farms Not Factories.

Back Row; Colette Stewart (Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland), Jerome Flynn, Gizzi Erskine, Leslie Ash, Ciaran McMenamin, James Orr (Director FOE Northern Ireland), Gwyneth McQuiston, Harriett Moore-Boyd. Front Row; Philip Lymbery (CEO Compassion in World Farming), Vincent Lusby, Raymond Pollock (Farmer), Tracy Worcester (Farms not Factories)

Speaking after the meeting in an interview with Farms Not Factories, Jerome said,

“It’s a majestic, beautiful land which, as soon as you bring in a factory farm, is completely ruined. It’s polluted. People won’t want to walk there anymore. It becomes dangerous for children to play there. If you just took it from the point of view of the welfare of the animals and the lives that we’re asking them to lead, its heartbreaking, how have we got to this? How are we even considering going further with it? For growth and progress? So let’s subsidise the local farmers who want to ethically rear their animals, giving them a life that’s worth living, the free life that they deserve. The government has to wake up to what’s really going on, otherwise we’re in big trouble.”

For Farms Not Factories’ next media-seeking prank, Jerome agreed to be filmed trapped in a cage in the middle of Oxford Circus, the busiest part of London, as a protest against the cruel cramped steel cages that pigs in factory farms have to endure for months on end. Thanks to careful timing of the traffic lights and a team of volunteers and Jerome’s unending good will, the headline ‘Jerome Flynn crams himself into a cage on Oxford Street’ appeared in newspapers the following day.

Speaking afterwards in a video at the location, Jerome said,

“I’ve done something I thought I’d never do, which was getting a cage next to a pig in the middle of Oxford Street. The cages represent the cage around our hearts that we have constructed that allows us to treat animals in this way, for mother pigs to spend two and a half months of their year in a cage where they can’t even move and can’t nestle up to their piglets. Hundreds of thousands of pigs spend their lives without seeing the sky or feeling the earth under their feet.

This has to stop and we’re asking not only our retailers to stop buying the meat, but the people who are going to those shops to stop buying it too, and to check the labels, because we have the choice and we have the freedom to take away that abominable suffering from our animals.”

We consumers can do this together by making sure we only buy pork from high welfare farms where pigs are free to roam outdoors or shelter in dry barns with plenty of straw. The government and Big Ag want us to choose between factory farmed meat or fake meat produced in a lab from animal cells, or insects, but these are all false solutions. We can support small-scale, traditional, high welfare farmers by making sure we only buy from farms we know and trust. Jerome is vegan and only eats organic vegetables grown at home or from local growers. Over the decades he has been a persistent, humane voice urging us to open our hearts to the way we keep animals in our care, and how we must treat them, not as units of production, but as living beings like ourselves that deserve our utmost reverence and respect.