Inside the making of Harry Styles’ gay cop movie, My Policeman – British GQ

In June last year, filming for My Policeman — Amazon’s multi-million dollar adaptation of Bethan Roberts’ ’50s-set gay romance novel, centring on the ill-fated romance of Tom, the eponymous lawman, and Patrick, his museum curator lover — took musician-turned-actor Harry Styles and the hitherto unknown David Dawson to Venice. 

They were there to shoot a series of scenes in the movie’s third act, when the clandestine lovers embark on a sojourn to the ancient Italian city. They have a wonderful time, unshackled from the prejudices of their native England, but it percolates with tragic inevitability: the sense that this is a dream, that it is a finite moment, weighs heavily in the air. 

Of course, shooting a film with the most famous pop star on the planet comes with its own set of hurdles. “We did a lot of pre-planning to disguise the name of the film, to do all sorts of things to [prevent fans from turning up],” says director Michael Grandage. But not much of that did happen — until Venice. “Suddenly, we realised there was a lot of interest at the end of the canals. We could hear all sorts of screaming going on. But we actually managed to have a pretty successful shoot,” he says. “I’ll say this about Harry’s fans: they are phenomenally respectful people. If a fan is a mirror of the person they are following, that doesn’t surprise me.”

If My Policeman remains one of the most hotly anticipated films of the year, ahead of its release in cinemas in mid-October (with a Prime Video drop to come in November), it’s for one man: Harry Styles. It all began in early 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic sent the world into stasis – and, atypical of the Hollywood casting process, it was actually Styles who offered his services. “So I took a meeting in my office in London,” recalls Grandage. “The person who arrived was incredibly informed: he’d not just read the novel, at least once, he’d read the screenplay many times. I was sitting opposite somebody who was making a case for why they wanted to play Tom Burgess. I didn’t have to sell it.”

Prior to that meeting with Grandage, we’d only seen Styles on the big screen twice — no, not counting One Direction: This Is Us, or sequel Where We Are – and both were minor roles. His most affective part came in Christopher Nolan’s epic war drama Dunkirk as a perennially anxious English soldier. Later, a 30-second bookend cameo as Eros, the latest MCU goodie-among-goodies, after the credits in Eternals. “It was really about the risk of somebody who at that moment had only done [Dunkirk],” Grandage continues. “For me, it’s about whether you see something that excites you, or interests you in what they’re saying. And I did with him.”