Harry Styles has said his sex scenes with David Dawson in the forthcoming movie My Policeman are “tender and loving.”
The drama, directed by Michael Grandage, will have its world premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival. It portrays a relationship between a closeted police officer (Styles) and a museum curator (Dawson) in the 1950s.
“It’s obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be gay. That was illegal,’” Styles told Rolling Stone. “Everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it.”
But, Styles said, My Policeman is not “a gay story about these guys being gay.” He added: “It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”
Styles said Grandage wanted to show a different side to sex between two men.
“So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” he explained. “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 [Michael] wanted to show that it’s tender and loving and sensitive.”
Elsewhere in the Rolling Stone interview, Styles addressed speculation about his own sexuality.
“Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone,” he said. “ If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship or something.”
Styles said he has intentionally tried to keep his private life private.
“I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively,” he said. “There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.”