Don’t Worry Darling — OIivia Wilde’s upcoming period thriller won’t be the only movie Harry Styles is starring in this year.
Today (June 9), Amazon released the first promo photos of My Policeman, the romantic drama that finds Styles starring alongside The Crown’s Emma Corrin and The Last Kingdom’s David Dawson. Based on the 2012 book of the same name by author Bethan Roberts, My Policeman is set in 1957 Brighton, England, where Styles’s Officer Tom hides his sexuality by dating a schoolteacher named Marion (Corrin) but simultaneously has a secret, illicit relationship with a museum curator named Patrick (Dawson). The angst-filled queer movie also jumps back and forth between the 1950s and ‘90s showing the characters in older ages, with Tom played by Linus Roache, Marion by Gina McKee, and Patrick by Rupert Everett.
“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,” director Michael Grandage told Vanity Fair in a new interview. “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.”
One moody first-look photo shows Styles, Corrin, and Dawson in sleek ‘50s outfits in front of the framed paintings of a museum; in another, Styles — an eternally wet boy — is relaxing in a pool with wet hair.
According to the magazine, Grandage initially did not consider casting Styles in the film until he was told by his team that Styles had read the script with great interest. At the time, Harry’s acting resumé only consisted of a supporting role as the British Army soldier Alex in the 2017 war film Dunkirk. (Since then, he’s also had his not-so-secret cameo as Eros/Starfox in Marvel’s Eternals.)
When he met the “Watermelon Sugar” singer for the first time, he was immediately impressed. “He had read the script so many times that he knew every single beat of it at that meeting. I found that incredibly impressive,” he said. “He knew other people’s lines; he knew all of his lines. He knew why he wanted to talk about it, why one scene worked this way and another worked another way.”
This fall will truly be the time to step into Harry’s House. My Policeman is set for a limited release in theaters on October 21 and will be available to stream on Prime Video on November 4. And Don’t Worry Darling hits cinemas September 23.
Currently, Styles is topping the charts since the dropping his third studio album, Harry’s House, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and several other charts in multiple countries. Lead single “As It Was” still sits atop the Hot 100, and three songs from the album have debuted in the chart’s Top 10: “Late Night Talking” (No. 4), “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” (No. 8) and “Matilda” (No. 9).