If you blinked during The Queen’s Gambit, you may not have recognised Harry Melling. Once the chubby-cheeked Dudley Dursley in Harry Potter, Melling has spent the last few years quietly reinventing himself as one of the UK’s most compelling character actors.
Now, he's stepped into his boldest role yet - one that’s landed him at the centre of an X-rated Cannes sensation and firmly out of the long shadow cast by his childhood fame.
The film in question is Pillion, a raw, racy BDSM drama that had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival over the weekend.
Melling, now 36, plays Colin - a timid parking attendant drawn into an intense, sexually charged relationship with a confident biker gang leader, Ray, played by Alexander Skarsgård (in thigh-high leather boots, naturally). The film earned an eight-minute standing ovation and instantly became one of the most talked-about titles on the Croisette.
To say it’s a departure from the world of wand-waving wizards is an understatement. In Pillion, Melling submits himself, quite literally, to a journey of psychological and sexual self-discovery.
The dynamic between Colin and Ray explores power, vulnerability, queerness and kink, in a film that’s as tender as it is transgressive.
“A film that deftly balances squirmy comedy with gentle pathos, social suspense with offbeat warmth,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw put it even more bluntly: “It’s basically what Fifty Shades of Grey should have been.”
Melling’s performance is already being hailed as a revelation. Critics are calling it his “breakthrough role” and praising his ability to embody Colin’s quiet desperation and radical transformation.
“The emotional and dramatic weight lies almost entirely with Colin,” wrote Screen International’s Nikki Baughan, “and Melling makes a strong impact in a role that is far away from his turn as the boorish Dudley Dursley.”
Which is exactly the point. Melling has spoken before about how his physical transformation, losing weight as he grew older, allowed him to quietly shake off the typecasting that dogs so many former child actors.
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“When you’re 10 years old and you play a role like that, people are going to want to hold on to that thing,” he said in an interview with The Independent. “But that was 23 years ago.”
Since Potter, he’s picked roles with quiet precision: a sinister Southern preacher in The Devil All the Time, a coldly ambitious chess player in The Queen’s Gambit, and Edgar Allan Poe in The Pale Blue Eye. He’s clearly drawn to darker, weirder territory. The kind that lets him disappear into character rather than coast on nostalgia.
And Pillion, the feature debut from director Harry Lighton, is perhaps his boldest disappearance yet. What could have easily tipped into shock-factor territory is instead nuanced and, by many accounts, deeply moving.
Melling’s Colin starts the film repressed and invisible and ends it transformed by a relationship that forces him to confront his deepest fears and desires. It’s a role that demands vulnerability, not just physically but emotionally, and Melling delivers with unflinching honesty.
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Skarsgård, for his part, continues his reign as cinema’s go-to Nordic “hottie”. A veteran of boundary-pushing roles, from True Blood to The Northman, he appears entirely at ease as the leather-clad Ray.
When asked about the film’s explicit content, he shrugged: “I’m Scandinavian, goddammit! We love to be naked.”
With its taboo-breaking premise, knockout performances and indie pedigree, Pillion looks poised to be a major awards season disruptor. But it’s also a statement - for Lighton as a bold new filmmaker, and for Melling, as an actor who refuses to be boxed in by his childhood fame.
“I think you can be an actor in whatever shape you want to be,” Melling said. And if Pillion is anything to go by, that shape is fearless and uncensored.