Harry Styles continues to add impressive credits to his acting career. In what could be his most dramatic role yet, Styles stars in “My Policeman,” a historical romance that trails a closeted gay policeman in the 1950’s and a complicated love triangle.
Based on the successful novel by Bethan Roberts, the film follows three characters across two timelines, one set in the ‘50s and another set in the ‘90s. As a young man, Tom (Syles) is a policeman in Brighton, who marries a school teacher even though he’s gay. He then starts a secret affair with a museum curator.
“The whole point of Tom is that he is a character who is confused. It’s made more problematic by the fact that he’s a policeman, and he’s in a career that is about upholding the law. And the law in the country at the time is about everything he feels—the complexity of it is something that whoever was going to play younger Tom and older Tom needed to somehow understand and absorb,” explained Michael Grandage, the film’s director, in an interview with Vanity Fair.
When discussing the decision to cast Harry Styles, a notorious celebrity mostly known for his career in music, Grandage explained how his relative inexperience with acting worked to the film’s advantage. “Because he hasn’t done much, he hasn’t developed the ability to work out tricks or even lie. He can only do it truthfully and as he knows it,” he said. “This story is about two people that are in love with Tom, slightly obsessed with him,” said Robbie Rogers, one of the film’s producers. “Harry—the world is so transfixed on him, on his every move.”
“My Policeman” co-stars “The Crown’s” Emma Corrin and David Dawson, two rising young actors, and is expected to be released this October 21st.