It’s hard to define a Harry Melling role these days, but even by that standard, few would have the lead of a gay BDSM rom-com on their bingo card — including Melling himself. But this is how the 36-year-old London native prefers to operate, with the risky, unexpected choice serving as something of a norm. 

Melling’s career began as a child, portraying Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films; he amassed his first five feature credits in that franchise, wrapping it at 21 years old. In part because of his fears of being defined by that experience, the years since have been characterized by a range of bold, charismatic and unusual screen performances. Melling has popped in multiple projects helmed by the Coen Brothers (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Tragedy of Macbeth) while holding his own opposite the likes of Christian Bale (The Pale Blue Eye) and Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit). 

But Pillion, the feature directorial debut of Harry Lighton, feels like the showcase part he’s been building toward. Melling plays Colin, a meek parking-ticket enforcer with a passion for barbershop-quartet singing. He meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), an enigmatic member of a local biker gang, and is promptly seduced into his world through a strict sexual arrangement: Colin learns how to be the submissive to Ray’s dom. This includes some graphic sex scenes, thorough explorations of kink, and a surprisingly sweet romantic undertone — Lighton inches toward cozy rom-com territory, complete with a Christmas backdrop, without sacrificing the more risqué elements.

A24 will release the film stateside on Feb. 6, but also made room for a qualifying 2025 run to push for awards consideration — which has already paid off, as Lighton won the Gotham Award for best adapted screenplay over revered competitors including Paul Thomas Anderson and Park Chan-wook. Melling, too, has rightly earned recognition, including a British Independent Film Award nom for best lead performance. “This movie is the gift that keeps on giving,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter — and a good statement for how he hopes to build his career from here. 

What is your expectation with a movie like Pillion? It’s a great part, obviously, but on paper not a project that’d necessarily go mainstream in any way. 

It’s niche, right? The subject matter is niche, the relationship is very unconventional in certain ways. The script was very much looking at a subculture. I always knew Harry [Lighton] wanted to handle it in a way which would allow for as much access and relatability as possible, but we never anticipated the reach it’s had so far. Often it’s the other way around — you’re in projects where you feel like it should be a big splash, and then that sometimes doesn’t happen. You can never really second-guess these things, but certainly with a movie like Pillion, which was made for nothing, to have the life it’s had — it’s extraordinary.

Is there something for you in this being a very sex-positive movie? It feels pretty rare right now, at least among movies that meet this kind of audience, and I’d imagine that it’s new territory for you as well.

Yeah, it is. For me, the thing that so attracted me to the script was the fact that the sex scenes housed narrative. They housed the story of Colin’s evolution into an experience of knowing what he wants. I don’t think sex scenes do that a lot. A lot of the time, sex scenes are just there as interludes to try and, I don’t know, make an audience feel horny — and hopefully we do the same in this, obviously. But what is so good about those intimate scenes, or why I think they’re resonating, is they’re telling a story at every moment. They’re telling it as it is in all its clumsiness and its awkwardness and it not working at times.

For me, there’s also just something to being able to talk about sex through a film like this. Because it’s so character-driven, it provides an outlet to talk about things in people’s lives that people don’t often like to talk about.

Absolutely. And it’s funny — hopefully you’re never poking fun at the people involved in it, but it just innately is funny. Watching Colin struggle about how to lick a boot is funny. 

When it came to diving into this subculture, was it eye-opening for you as a person, in addition to what you had to do on screen?

Yeah, I mean, I went on this incredible pillion pilgrimage. Paul [Tallis], who was a pup in the movie, took me on the back of his bike to Cambridge Pride. He introduced me to all of his friends, some of whom were in the kink community. Much like Colin, for me, it was an education into their world, into how they chose to express themselves in what sex meant for them — what being in a sort of dom dynamic meant to them. All these things were new to me.

I think the reason in hindsight why they really wanted to share their worlds and experiences was because they were hoping that this is a moment for their story of their subculture, for what they’re into, to be presented on a platform where people can understand it. A lot of those guys ended up being in the movie, so it was a full circle moment. If there were ever questions that we weren’t familiar with, we could just lean on them to say, “How would you go about doing this? What is the position that one should be bent over a trestle table in?”

Did it ever feel awkward with Alexander?

No, never. Never, never. I mean, you’re doing weird shit, obviously. There might be an awkward little laugh of, like, “Oh, this is the moment where you grab Harry’s prosthetic penis and squeeze it.” But we were both so game. The first time we met, we were about to shoot the wrestling scene, and so we had to do that stunt rehearsal to work out the choreography of the wrestling stuff. That being the jumping-in point meant that actually there was no room to get awkward or to shy away from what we were doing. Some of the stuff like the wrestling scene especially was such an invitation to enjoy ourselves and to play with these characters and what they wanted.

You need to have a certain level of gameness to feel that way, so I’m curious how this extends to your philosophy as an actor when a project like that comes your way and you’re like, “Yes, totally.”

I like bold storytelling. That’s something that I’ve always gravitated to. I like stories that are unique, and this is certainly that — I’ve never read anything like it before. If you are confident with that, with the level of script writing, your job is really just to do the script. I would be more nervous if I knew the script wasn’t ready. That is when I’d start to freak out — when I’d feel like, “Oh shit, I’m taking a huge jump.” I look for detail in every script because if you can find the detail and live in that, you’re not having to manufacture things. It’s just about discovering who these people are. 

What is a Harry Melling role to you these days? Of late, that feels very difficult to define —  

 — that’s fucking amazing.

Right, and takes some work. 

It’s very contrary to what this industry wants you to be, and that for me is the biggest compliment someone could ever pay me. It’s always the space that I want to try and live in. I don’t want people to know me. I don’t want people to have an understanding of me prior to — I mean, obviously I kind of fucked it up doing Harry Potter (Laughs). But I really don’t want people to have an understanding of who I am going into a movie. I want them just to see the character, which is maybe why it feels eclectic and you can’t pigeonhole it. 

Well, you were a child when you did Harry Potter.

But people hold onto that. They do. I was a wee babe, really.

How have you worked to get to this kind of place, then? To your point, it’s not what the industry encourages.

I’ve always tried to be led by the material and for some reason, when I feel that something could work, it’s a very defined feeling in me — like, “This is something that I really want to fight for.” I don’t want to second guess that impulse, but maybe in some way it has something to do from where I’ve been. I never think of it in terms of strategy or like, “Well, if you do a bit of this, then you’ve got to do a bit of this, and hopefully that will make people not know who you are.” A very good actor, Toby Jones, said this amazing thing to me: “Always be a moving target.” Let people try and zone in on wherever you’re going. It wasn’t later on in my career, because this was on Pale Blue Eye which was only a few years ago, but I thought, “That’s a really interesting concept — to let them find you, always.”

Did certain projects really hit those marks? I remember you really popping in the Coen Brothers’ Buster Scruggs. 

Definitely. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever consider working with Joel and Ethan Coen, and then they offered me that extraordinary role in that movie. Being in that movie, getting their thumbs up, was a huge opening in introducing me to other directors that I would just not have been introduced to without Joel and Ethan. There are definite moments that allow for opportunity. Scott Cooper, who directed The Pale Blue Eye, saw Buster Scruggs — and that’s where his idea of Edgar Allen Poe came from. Having Joel and Ethan’s blessing so early on opened up the way for this chapter in my career. 

I saw a quote of yours the other day, where you said you felt like you’ve been running away from Harry Potter your entire life. That’s a big quote. What did you mean by that? 

It is, and I said it in a jokey sort of way…. But yeah, to establish yourself so early as in this huge franchise — it was never a destination. At 10, or whatever, there was so much more to do. In a weird way, I knew that getting trapped within the child-actor thing was not going to allow me to do the other things that I wanted to do. Now I do theater and work with the likes of the Coen Brothers, work in America, and do so much work in UK independent film. I almost do so much — so I think maybe there was this engine underneath me, which was: “Keep moving, keep going, keep going. Don’t fall into it.” Sometimes child acting can get a negative stigma. I just never wanted that to be me. I didn’t fall in love with being in Harry Potter. I fell in love with the concept of people being many things, and that’s the thing that I wanted to spend my life doing. That felt very precious to me and was something that I really wanted to have a go at doing in my life.

I would imagine that your relationship to acting simply changes too. In the period of the Harry Potter films, that’s basically all you did — that was your world. And then suddenly you get to see this much bigger world as an actor, and as an adult.

Absolutely. But even when I was doing Harry Potter, I was obsessed with theater. Theater was my main love in a strange way. It was the thing that I was completely obsessed with. Even as a 10-year-old, I knew that I wanted to learn how to speak Shakespeare properly and to be a stage actor. A lot of the more senior actors in the Harry Potter world were all these incredible stage actors — and I wanted to have that career. Then going to drama school changes what you want in coming out the other side. But at the same time, Harry Potter is this huge, huge franchise, and I never wanted to be in any way shackled to it. I always wanted to have a really big career and try lots of different things.

I guess it’s like saying, imagine if an article you wrote when you were 10 was like the article. You’d be like, “Oh, no, come on guys. There’s so many great people I’ve interviewed since then!” (Laughs) So it is a really interesting relationship you enter, when dealing with something as huge as Potter.

And here we’re talking about a movie made for very little in Pillion. You mentioned the British indie sector being important to you. I’m more familiar with the challenged state of things over here, but how do you assess its status? 

I’m getting familiar with the narrative of just how difficult — what a miracle, actually — it is to get a UK independent movie made. So people tell me, the more you do it, the more you are involved in this scene, the more you can help get these things made and the more influence you can have. Even just how you can reach out to certain creatives to help build the creative catalog of who gets involved in these kinds of movies, that is something that, going forward, I’m going to be very passionate about. I’ve worked with very young directors — well, I say young, they’re about my age, but in terms of it being a first feature, which is a huge thing to do. As an actor, you’re in service to the director completely and making sure their vision is a reality and happens in the way they see it. Like you say, it’s exactly the same here. — it’s precarious. Getting anything made is a minor miracle.

That’s a funny dynamic to consider, on something like Pillion — compared to Harry Lighton, you’re the veteran on set.

Yeah, it is mad, especially when you go from these bigger American directors with the Coens or Scott Cooper. These films are housed in a studio, it’s a very different feel. Harry Lighton almost said this amazing thing to me: “I just want to make my first movie and be able to make a second movie. In the back of my head, I’m always going, “Okay, this is Harry Lighton. We’re going to make sure he gets that second movie made.” It’s such a hard thing to do, and for it to resonate within the collections of films that come out every year.

I’d love to see you in the next Harry Lighton movie.

He keeps putting ideas out there. They’re everywhere. I’m like, just land on one, Harry, come on, you’ve got this. (Laughs) But I’m very excited to see what he comes up with.