Harry Styles: ‘My Policeman’ Sex Scenes Will Show ‘Tenderness’ of Queer Love

Samantha Bergeson

Harry Styles is proud to be a part of showing the “tenderness” of gay sex.

The Grammy winner stars opposite Emma Corrin in “My Policeman,” a 1957-set period piece about a love triangle between a closeted cop (Styles), his wife (Corrin), and a museum curator (David Dawson).

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“It’s obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be gay. That was illegal,'” Styles told Rolling Stone of leading the film. “I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it. It’s not like ‘This is a gay story about these guys being gay.’ It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”

Based on Bethan Roberts’ 2012 novel of the same name, “My Policeman” is helmed by “Genius” director Michael Grandage and is set for a TIFF premiere before debuting in theaters October 21, followed by a Prime Video streaming launch November 4.

Styles added that the sex scenes in “My Policeman” focus more so on emotional lovemaking rather than the physicality of intercourse, compared to his “Don’t Worry Darling” steamy sex scenes opposite Florence Pugh.

“So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” Styles opened up. “There will be, I would imagine, some people who watch it who were very much alive during this time when it was illegal to be gay, and [director Michael] wanted to show that it’s tender and loving and sensitive.”

Grandage previously told Vanity Fair that the queer sex scenes “quite literally show something that was about ‘lovemaking’ in the broadest sense of the word, something that was choreographically interesting and not just some kind of thrusting sense of sex going on.”

Per Grandage, Styles was also not an obvious choice for the film but showed his commitment by memorizing “every single beat” of the script prior to meeting with the producers. “He knew other people’s lines; he knew all of his lines,” Grandage remembered. “He knew why he wanted to talk about it, why one scene worked this way and another worked. I found that extremely impressive.”

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