‘It’s not something I look back on’: Harry ‘Dudley’ Melling on swapping JK Rowling for Shakespeare

Harry Melling looks pained. It could be the jittery Zoom connection, but he hasn't said anything for a while, and he is gazing off-screen with a back-from-Nam hauntedness.

I clear my throat, and repeat the question. “Actually, if we could keep to the film please,” the publicist steps smoothly in for the second time. We’ve stumbled, it’s clear, into a conversational DMZ.

Only one subject could ice over a Hollywood interview so speedily these days: JK Rowling. I’d asked Melling – who played Dudley Dursley in five of the Harry Potter films – what he thought of the controversy surrounding the author. As we’re talking, the outrage du jour is over the alleged anti-Semitism of Gringott’s goblins. That day, the American comedian Jon Stewart had compared them on a podcast to Jewish caricatures from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet. Yet it’s a measure of how toxic the debate around Rowling has become that it would be hard to find a moment in the last few years when discussing her wouldn’t be a dicey move for a young actor on the up.

Which is a shame, as for the rest of our conversation Melling is chatty and charming, a beanie pulled low over his dark curls and a white AirPod dangling raffishly from one ear. As it is, he tip-toes around my Rowling question.

“I don’t think I’m the right person to ask about that,” he says, choosing his words as carefully as a hostage negotiator. “I can’t speak on behalf of JK Rowling, she created some amazing stories, but I can’t get involved in what’s right and what’s wrong. I have my own beliefs – but that’s her own thing, and how people want to react to that is their own thing.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to grill the 32-year-old about a role he left behind while still a teenager. After all, Melling has been more successful than most of his young co-stars in escaping the gravitational pull of the ￡11 billion franchise. In the main, their choices have ranged from the effortfully indie – one of Daniel Radcliffe’s recent films, Guns Akimbo, a grindhouse action flick, saw him play a man with pistols surgically bolted to his hands – to gloopy Disney fare, such as Emma Watson’s Belle in the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast.

Melling, meanwhile, has carved out a succession of small but weighty roles in well-chosen films. His haunting turn as a quadriplegic artist was the best part of the Coen Brothers’ Western anthology 2018 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He told Vodzilla in 2018 that getting cast in the film, after a “very conventional multi-stage audition” was “a dream come true”.

And he delivered a chewily ripe performance in Antonio Campos’s Southern Gothic The Devil All the Time (2020) as a deranged backwoods preacher whose party trick is chucking a bucket of live spiders over his head. But it was his role as chess prodigy Harry Beltik in Netflix’s unlikely lockdown hit The Queen’s Gambit which got the world to sit up. Reddit threads lit up when the secret got out that Anya Taylor-Joy’s handsome rival-turned-suitor was none other than Harry Potter’s pudgy preteen persecutor.

Now he has reunited with Joel Coen for the director’s lean, poetic take on the Scottish Play, The Tragedy of Macbeth. Did the world need another version of Macbeth? He laughs. “Yeah, it’s like: ‘Again, really?’ But why do we always go back to Shakespeare? I think it’s a combination of the language as well as his understanding of human beings. I’m reading this biography of Francis Bacon and he talks about how art should engage the nervous system. Good Shakespeare does that. It gets inside you.”

You certainly feel The Tragedy of Macbeth in your gut. Filmed in square ratio on eerie monochrome print, Coen drew inspiration from the black-and-white chill of German Expressionist classics such as The Night of the Hunter. Melling plays Malcolm, the son of Duncan, alongside Brendan Gleeson as the doomed king, and Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington as the tragic couple. His striking features, angular yet cherubic, are of a piece with the otherworldly breeze which blows through the film. On camera, his face looms with wide, expressive eyes as the set – vast, geometric blocks against painted backdrops – marches off into the mist. How did he feel about working with so many modern greats?

“I don’t think I'm often intimidated by actors,” he says. “That first read through was certainly a big moment, though. But we had two weeks of rehearsal time before we began filming, and then you stop putting these actors on pedestals because we’re all in a room trying to make this thing work.”

That rehearsal time was also a chance to draw out the theatricality of Coen’s approach. His Macbeth aspires to the scale of cinema, but has the breathing intimacy of live theatre. Melling had performed the play only once before (“I think I did it for a junior drama class”), but has two stage productions of King Lear, playing the Fool and Edgar, under his belt. Bringing the verse to life naturally on camera, though, was a challenge.

“How do you translate the language's weight and meaning without it becoming overwhelming? Joel’s interpretation allowed us to engage with the verse in a more theatrical way,” he explains. “At one point, we all did it in American accents… until we realised that wasn’t going to work for us!”

Not that Melling is averse to a trans-Atlantic twang. As Harry Beltik, the state chess champion of Kentucky, he swaggered into The Queen’s Gambit, trouncing Anya Taylor-Joy's Beth Harmon in their first encounter. That scene was a wonderful pas de deux across the board as frustration and flirtation flicked back and forth, scored by the relentless ticking of the clock. It’s hard to believe that Melling had barely touched a chess board before the series.

“I couldn’t play! I had no relationship [with] chess,” he says. “But I soon got really into it. We had this masterful chess coach called Bruce Pandolfini who put us through our paces and taught us to move the pieces. To be fair, it was more about how to move the pieces and look good doing it, than [learning] loads of strategy because I’m sure the strategy would have been very complicated.”

That said, Melling occasionally squared off against fellow cast members between shoots. “Jacob Fortune-Lloyd [who plays DL Townes] was particularly good,” he remembers. “We started a game, but never got a chance to finish it, which was lucky because he was beating me hard.”

Under Pandolfini’s direction, Melling modelled his chess style after the steady, sober playing of the Norwegian Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. He recalls: “There’s a whole language with moving pieces, and what the other player can decipher from the manner in which you moved it. I thought Harry Beltik should be very upright because he’s honourable. There should be an elegance to it, it wasn't chaotic. During one take, I hit the clock with the chess piece and Bruce came over and said: ‘That’s not very Harry Beltik.’”

The Queen’s Gambit, of course, is not really about chess. Its success lay in the way it wrapped chin-stroking stylings – the lighting, the fashion, Taylor-Joy’s razor-edged bob – around a moreishly trashy plot. And Melling’s good-hearted Beltik was key to that sleight-of-hand. How does it feel to have become an unlikely sex symbol? He chuckles. “Who knew chess boys were a thing? Hey, what can I say? It’s flattering.”

As for his weight loss between Harry Potter and The Queen’s Gambit, he claims it was unspectacular. “It just happened,” he says. “I was 18, I was at drama school, I had a different routine – and I just started losing weight. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Nor was it a decision against being fat when you’re younger.”

Melling’s transformation during the Harry Potter films was so pronounced that he wore prosthetics to play Dudley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1. “[But] there was no pressure from the producers to maintain a certain weight,” he explains. “At no point did I think I was going to get recast. It was something which happened naturally, rather than being planned.”

We move on to how he got his break in the industry. Melling grew up in London, where he lives now, and he is guarded about his relationship status. What is on the public record is that he comes from the Troughton showbusiness dynasty; his mother is the children’s book writer and illustrator Joanna Troughton, and his cousins are the actors Sam Troughton and William Troughton, who stars as Tom Archer in The Archers. His grandfather was Patrick Troughton, the renowned 20th Century thesp whose beloved stint on Doctor Who, playing the second incarnation of the Time Lord as a woebegone “cosmic hobo”, arguably ensured the series’ survival.

“He died before I was born, so I never met him. But all the family talk about how proud they are of him. I think every acting family has a sense of what a wonderful thing it is to be part of such a celebrated group of actors. But at the same time, it’s a burden because it comes with an expectation of who you are and what you’re going to do.”

I mention the search is on for a new Doctor, as the Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall era creaks to a close. He shoots back: “I’d be the least interesting choice ever! I’d be the worst choice, but who knows? I haven’t had the call, and that’s probably a good thing.”

You get the impression Melling isn’t in a hurry to hitch himself to another tent-pole franchise with a seething fan base. After all, the outsized figure of Dudley still inevitably looms large in his career. He didn’t go to HBO Max’s glitzy 20th anniversary celebration of the first Harry Potter film (“I’ve been so busy that I didn’t know whether I was asked or not”), and finds it “surreal” watching clips from the films.

“It’s a very strange experience – it is you, and it isn’t you. It was an extraordinary thing to happen to me at that age, and I’m very proud of it. I’m constantly amazed at how much of a presence it still has in the world, and how it keeps going from generation to generation. Friends of mine with kids will watch it and suddenly Uncle Harry is [Dudley Dursley]. I recognise myself, but at the same time it’s distant and like watching something through a foggy VHS.” He adds: “But I admit it’s not something I look back on often. I’m more focused on looking ahead.”

And there’s plenty to keep him occupied on the horizon. He’s currently wrapping shooting on The Pale Blue Eye, Scott Cooper's adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 2006 counterfactual horror novel. Melling plays a young Edgar Allan Poe who, while still a West Point cadet, investigates a series of murders with Christian Bale’s retired detective. Bale is another child actor who used early exposure to launch an acclaimed career. Did he have any advice?

Melling reflects: “There is a stigma around child actors, but [Bale in Empire of the Sun] is one of the greatest child actor performances. And how he has manoeuvred through his career is amazing. At the moment, the most important thing for someone like me to do is to just take the script, and see if I can offer something towards it. And hopefully the rest will take care of itself.”

The Tragedy of Macbeth is in cinemas and on Apple TV+ from January 14