Even as one of the most hated Muggles in the wizarding world,Harry Mellingnever actually felt famous.
He still doesn’t.
Unlike his contemporaries, he found life on set to be quite isolating at times.
Harry Melling portrays Edgar Allan Poe in Scott Cooper’s ‘The Pale Blue Eye.'.Scott Garfield/Netflix
“The earthly sequences would very much be an isolated filming block.
So, I dipped in, and then I went back to school and normal life.”
Melling never felt as if people would recognize him on the streets of London.
Harry Melling (center) as Dudley Dursley in ‘Harry Potter’.warner bros.
“Which I kind of loved,” he quickly adds.
To him, fame feels like noise.
He counts himself lucky that he hasn’t become traditionally “famous.”
Christian Bale stars in ‘The Pale Blue Eye’ as Det. Augustus Landor opposite Harry Melling’s ‘The Pale Blue Eye.'.Scott Garfield/Netflix
“Sometimes it’s nice to just concentrate on the work and what excites you,” he says.
“I was struck by that performance,” Cooper tells EW of Melling’s work inBuster Scruggs.
“I felt, ‘My God!
He would be a really terrific Edgar Allan Poe.’
And as we say in Virginia, he kind offavorsPoe.
He looks like him.”
He was just eager to work with the Coen brothers.
However small a role he was going to get was fine by him.
Most of Melling’s feelings towards those movies have arisen in hindsight.
But at the time, he just remembers falling in love with storytelling.
“I always loved theater.
I always have,” he mentions.
“And I knew I wanted to get better at acting.”
From there, Melling enjoyed a healthy stint in theater.
The Pale Blue Eyeis the film Melling now calls his “eureka moment.”
“Every single role you do, you learn something more.
You learn a different way of operating,” he says.
“What a discovery for me,” Bale remarks of Melling.
“Obviously, other people knew him before.
It was a sequence, like so many others in the film, with dense dialogue.
Melling found himself thinking back to a lesson he had learned in drama school.
“I think the best thing you could do is jump and see what happens and to risk.”
OnThe Pale Blue Eye, he decided to throw himself into the scene.
Some discussion was had, of course.
Cooper would plot every moment with Melling as a point on a roadmap.
But the younger talent was floored by the veteran’s generosity.
His goal remains the same: ignore it.
“Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing it since I was very young,” he says.
“I try not to think of it in the moment.”
