In The Pale Blue Eye, Netflix’s new 1830’s gothic thriller, Christian Bale and Harry Melling play a curious double-act. Bale is the gruff, mysterious detective hired to solve a series of murders at a US military school in upstate New York, while Melling, as a young Edgar Allan Poe and a student at the academy, is roped in as his accomplice. As Detective Augustus Landor, Bale is naturally walled-off and wallowing, but it’s Melling that brings a curious light and shade to his portrayal of the author; deliriously highbrow and swaddled in old-world-charm, it’s like watching Niles Crane trapped in the body of Foghorn Leghorn.
Melling has been quietly turning in these remarkable performances for several years. Yes, he was the obnoxious Dudley Dursey in the Harry Potter movies, the boy wizard’s bully of a cousin who largely existed to throw his weight around for the first 20 minutes of each movie. But after the franchise wrapped, he enrolled at drama school LAMDA and even took to writing plays.
People regularly weigh up the careers and successes of alumni Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, but Melling’s smaller role left him largely underestimated. He used that period to quietly reinvent himself, developing an auteur’s eye and working on the kind of intense, character-based roles most actors would kill for: he appeared opposite Liam Neeson in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and played chess player Harry Beltik in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. As well as working with greats like Bale, Gillian Anderson, Timothy Spall and Toby Jones in The Pale Blue Eye, he’s just wrapped on the Michael Winterbottom film A Promised Land, too. GQ called Melling to discuss Potter, the weird art of Francis Bacon, and the benefits of a good long walk.
You filmed The Pale Blue Eye in Pittsburgh. Was it actually cold there or were you wandering around fake snow?
It was filmed this time last year, and it was that cold, I mean, how it looks in every single frame, with that brutal kind of landscape, the harshness of what the conditions, it was really, really freezing. In a weird way, I kind of enjoyed it. You get a sense of what these people had been through back in the 1830s. The reality of the conditions they would have had to live through. I loved Pittsburgh, too, but we filmed during the height of Omicron. So that was interesting. But we all made it through and we got the film done.
Did filming in a pandemic make your job harder or more internal in some way? I imagine sets to be social spaces, but that kind of thing was curbed…
Absolutely, it's a big shame that you can't hang out afterwards. You have to be careful about what you can and can't do. There's a pressure when you're shooting to just keep it going. There was a constant fear to stay healthy. Keep the film going, keep the film going. And, you know, touch wood, that's what happened. But you're right, there is an added pressure, there's a sense of like, we can't do the things that maybe we could do on a usual set.
So what made you want to do this film?
I think I came into [director Scott Cooper's] mind because he saw The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He asked me to put myself on tape. I thought it was an incredible opportunity to play someone so multifaceted and complicated and contradictory. I think people have a very fixed idea of who Edgar Allan Poe is. And it was quite nice to really challenge that and go well, yes, we associate this guy as being this very dark, sombre moody character, but actually, how did he get there? And you know, Scott's writing is so flamboyant. With all that territory it was really exciting.
Everyone in the film is quite eccentric, or erratic. But Poe is the hardest to read. What is your take on that?
I thought the main thing was that we should enjoy him. Especially the beginning. His buoyant nature, his eccentricities. But if it's not grounded in anything, that kind of stuff, then it doesn't work. Scott kept talking about this sense of him not fitting in anywhere. He has no sense of home or belonging, some of which came from the research that I accumulated over the months of preparing for the role. If it's just flamboyant for the sake of it, it's just annoying.
What kind of research do you do when you’re beginning a project?
Well it’s a case-by-case thing but with this, it’s a fictional take on Poe, which makes it more complicated. That said, he’s such an iconic writer, so I did a tonne of research. You have to be aware of the stuff that people might land on. So I spent two months reading as much as I could, I read things other people wrote about him, I read his own works, and tried to get an idea of who he was. A lot of the things people wrote were quite contradictory, which I found amusing, because it only added to this idea of myth and mystery surrounding him.
The film is adapted from a book by Louis Bayard, and he fused historical facts with fiction. So I did the same. Suddenly, his upbringing was very interesting in terms of explaining the kind of ruthlessness he developed as a young man. But I also had the freedom to create something new.
I suppose it helps that the film is kind of not about Poe at all, it’s not like it ends with him seeing a raven outside and deciding to write a book about it.
Yeah he talks about being a poet but we don’t focus on his life as a writer. This is like the pre-pre-origin story. He introduces himself to Landor as ‘E. A. Poe’, it’s a wink and a nod more than anything.
You said earlier that Scott Cooper saw you in Buster Scruggs and considered you for this film. How much of your job is trying to, and I’m sorry but this is very on the nose, execute moves on a chess board knowing if you move to X it will allow you to do Y further down the road?
I'd say I try not to be strategic in any of my thinking. Because I'm not very good at it. It’s always been a case of: what is presented to me? What do I read? What do I engage with? What interests me? And that, I guess, is my strategy. It's not like, ‘if I do this Coen brothers film, I’ll get to work with Scott Cooper’.
Also, this film, The Queen’s Gambit, The Devil All The Time and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs have all been released on Netflix, too. I suppose on some level you don’t even know how many people are watching them so you don’t get too in your head about it.
I know it's weird, isn't it? I do try to shut out that noise as much as possible because it's never held in and the second I do start engaging those thoughts it just backfires.
Where did you learn to approach your career like that?
I think probably from doing it from a young age. I was mostly acting with adults on Harry Potter, and being around actors who are older than myself shows you how they carve out a career.
And with Harry Potter you were on this giant franchise but you weren’t casting spells or fighting goblins or anything, that was probably quite grounding.
Yes exactly, and in terms of scheduling as well, I’d film it for two months in a very compact block and then just go back to my normal life. The movie world and the real world were very separate. You’ve got to be very careful with having expectations of what your work's going to do.
You seem to play old souls in a lot of your work. Is there something about that archetype that you’re drawn to?
It's kind of bleeding out on the page, to be honest. It's not something that I'm actively pursuing. But I think there's a gentleness to a lot of my characters. They have an otherworldly soulfulness to them. There’s often a restlessness to them, too. But I don't really thread the roles together intentionally like that.
Jumping back a little to The Queen’s Gambit. What comes to mind when you think back to making that show?
I remember telling a friend: I'm doing this thing about chess. I think the writing is really good. The director is really good. And it’s really special and the cast is amazing, but it is about chess. Very niche subject matter. And then [mimics explosion noise] it just explodes. Maybe it was the context it came out in, I think we were in the second lockdown. Maybe people craved something specific in that time.
What are you working on at the moment?
I've just finished filming The Promised Land, a new Michael Winterbottom film, in Puglia, Italy. The setting is actually Palestine in the 1930s, which is interesting, but Puglia makes such a good match for that setting. I was sceptical to begin with, but then you go on set and you think ‘Oh this really does look like Jerusalem’.
Are you reading anything good (that’s not specifically work-related)?
Well I've just come off the back of reading this Francis Bacon book about his life. It was quite heavy-handed. I'm slightly obsessed with Francis Bacon. His images are very dark and very grotesque. Like, there's just a rack of meat and a body that is all twisted and contorted around. Lots of blood, it’s quite scary actually, which can make me nervous. But you go and see his art and it just smashes you in the face, and it makes you feel stuff immediately, sometimes stuff you don’t want to feel, but sometimes it elevates you and viewing it becomes a kind of sensory experience.
So you wouldn’t hang one in the bedroom, then.
No, but I just heard a story that someone bought one of these big screaming heads. And it's in their living room. Imagine looking at that every day.
The Pale Blue Eye is out in UK cinemas on 23 December, and on Netflix on 6 January.
