At 36, Harry Melling is having a moment. Long past his days as Dudley Dursley, Harry Potter’s pampered, odious cousin, Melling has quietly become one of Britain’s most intriguing character actors.
His latest role, in the Cannes hit Pillion, marks a new chapter for the transformative performer. Produced by Element Pictures, the engaging film, a queer BDSM romance costarring Alexander Skarsgård, follows Melling’s Colin, a poignantly awkward traffic attendant, as he becomes the submissive partner to Ray, the charismatic leader of a motorbike club.
A tender, kinky biker comedy with surprising echoes of Ealing Studios comedy, Pillion, the directorial debut of Harry Lighton, got an eight-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the French film festival in May – and generated an unexpected intimacy-co-ordination challenge to do with a picnic table.
The unassuming Melling is full of praise for his colleagues and for Robbie Taylor Hunt, the intimacy co-ordinator who supervised the sex scenes.
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“Robbie did such an amazing job,” says Melling. “He was really thorough and also allowed enough room for us to play and have fun. It felt like the intimacy was always an extension of the narrative and Colin’s character. It wasn’t like this separate, sexy moment.”
The ecstatic reception at Cannes is no surprise. Melling has emerged as an auteur’s favourite, working with the Coen brothers, on The Ballad of Buster Scruggs; a solo Joel Coen, The Tragedy of Macbeth; David Gray, on The Lost City of Z; Amanda Kramer, on Please Baby Please; and Michael Winterbottom, on Shoshana.
“Touch wood, I hope I can keep working with such brilliant, visionary directors,” he says. “Because, when it comes to film, it really is about them. As an actor, it’s never about you, not really. You’re there to support their vision, to give them enough material to take into the editing room and shape into the story they want to tell.”
In this spirit, Melling has finished shooting Butterfly Jam, Kantemir Balagov’s long-awaited follow-up to Beanpole, alongside Barry Keoghan.
Before that there’s the Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, her first film in English. Alongside collaborators such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Tsangari is a pioneering film-maker of the Greek weird wave, the cinematic movement famed for its deadpan tone and surreal, unsettling storytelling.
“I saw Chevalier before our first meeting,” Melling says. “That was my introduction to Athina’s work. It’s an extraordinary film, right? I knew that she had this project. I didn’t know anything about it. It was just a general meeting to catch each other’s vibration. And I just fell in love with her instantly.
“She’s such an artist, with a distinctive voice and a way of telling stories that feels very different to anything I have done before. She sent me the script but without any role attached to it. That’s a very nice way of entering a story, because you are navigating from every angle.”
An intriguing medieval folk western set in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides archipelago, Tsangari’s fourth feature brings together a fine cast – it also includes Caleb Landry Jones, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene and Frank Dillane – in an adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel.
Set across seven hallucinatory days in a nameless village, Harvest follows Walter Thirsk (Landry Jones), a townsman turned farmer and outsider in a superstitious, tight-knit community. The fragile rural life is shattered first by a mysterious barn fire – prompting the scapegoating of three strangers – and, soon after, by the arrival of Edmund Jordan (Dillane), the ambitious, pitiless cousin of the local lord, Master Kent (Melling), who asserts his claim on the land and threatens their communal traditions.
Nominally the kindlier lord who believes in land-sharing, Kent, struck by bumbling indecision, causes tensions to escalate, as greed, superstition, and fear of recently arrived outsiders take over.
“When I first read my character I thought, well, he’s stuck in an impossible situation,” says Melling. “He’s trying to please everyone. And if I try and do that, then at no point will the audience be too angry with him. Because he hovers between these different worlds, caught between the oncoming modernity and looking after old friends. He does care for the villagers. But it’s a film full of characters who keep sitting back and don’t know how to take action. The audience is constantly moving between different points of view. Who’s right and who’s wrong keeps shifting.”
Melling was born in London in 1989, the son of the children’s illustrator and writer Joanna Troughton and the animator James Melling. His grandfather is Patrick Troughton, best remembered as the second Doctor in Doctor Who. Storytelling is in the DNA.
“I think I caught that fascination with stories as a young child,” he says. “Between reading my mum’s picture books as a kid and then going to the theatre too young to watch, I just fell in love with stories. I knew that I’d love to do anything I could in that realm. It seems like one of the most extraordinary things that human beings can do.”
Melling was catapulted into the public eye by appearing in five of the eight Harry Potter films. His role was small but memorable, particularly for Dudley’s physical transformation and eventual moment of uneasy redemption in The Deathly Hallows, a scene that was ultimately cut from the final film.
Melling has deliberately distanced himself from the world of Harry Potter. He was a notable absentee from the 20th-anniversary television special Return to Hogwarts and has rarely spoken about the series, choosing instead to focus on theatre and independent film.
“One thing I did get from the Potter films was a curiosity about cinema,” he says. “How things work with different directors, I was always fascinated by that. To me there’s such a mystery around film: why a particular take works, why something doesn’t work. It’s something you are always trying to catch as an actor.”
After those films he enrolled at London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.
“I felt like I didn’t know anything,” he says. “I understood how a set worked. I understood the logistics. But in terms of performing I was just so hungry for knowledge. I went to drama school so naive and just wanting to get better and bridge the gap between being a child actor and a senior actor.
“I was surrounded by titans like Fiona Shaw. I was starry-eyed as they told me stories about theatre work. When I left I just did theatre for a long time. It’s great to be doing more movies, but I’d love to get back.”
When Christian Bale teamed up with him for The Pale Blue Eye, a murder mystery from 2022 in which Bale’s seasoned detective is assisted by a young Edgar Allan Poe, the veteran actor was full of praise for his screen partner. “He just made me only see him as Poe afterwards,” Bale said.
Melling has retained a soft spot for the 19th-century American author of The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart.
“I just adored playing him. He’s such a strange creature, and to have an opportunity to play against Christian Bale was wonderful. It was daunting in the sense that a lot of people were coming to that movie with an idea of who Edgar Allan Poe was. Luckily, because he was slightly younger, I had a bit more room to play with. But if I had to have a pint with any of my characters I’d probably say Edgar Allan Poe.
He pauses, almost apologetically. “But really any of them.”
Harvest is in cinemas from Friday, July 18th
