First Images Drop of Harry Styles in Gay Drama 'My Policeman'

Audiences eager for a glimpse of Harry Styles in the upcoming movie "My Policeman" got their wish when Amazon released two images from the film on June 9. The pair of first-look pics shows Styles and fellow cast members David Dawson and Emma Corrin.

Styles is primarily known as a pop singer, but he made an impressive movie debut in Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk." He's expanding his film credits list with "My Policeman," as well as another movie due out this year, Olivia Wilde's "Don't Worry Darling."

In "My Policeman," which is slated to hit the big screen on Oct. 21 before it starts streaming on Amazon Nov. 4, Styles "plays a closeted police officer who wants to lay some 'Watermelon Sugar' on a handsome museum curator," Entertainment Weekly said.

"Based on the book of the same name by author Bethan Roberts, 'My Policeman' is set in 1957 Brighton," EW added. "Styles plays Tom, who's gay but starts dating a schoolteacher, Marion ('The Crown's' Emma Corrin)," only to then fall for a museum curator named Patrick (David Dawson).

The film is also partially set forty years later, in the 1990s. For these scenes, the three characters are played by Linus Roache, Gina McKee, and Rupert Everett. All three wrestle in their later lives with repercussions from Tom's closeted younger years, when Tom was driven by the paradox of being an officer of the law at a time when being gay was illegal in Britain.

"It's a powerful story of forbidden love, regret, and living as your true self," Vanity Fair said, in a piece that also came out on June 9.

VF retraced the story's path from novel to big screen: Producer and former pro soccer player Robbie Rogers had read the book while still in the closet. He shared it with his boyfriend (now husband), film and television producer Greg Berlanti. Eventually, the couple brought the material to a film adaptation with a script by "Philadelphia" screenwriter Ron Nyswaner.

Billboard noted that Styles wasn't someone director Michael Grandage thought of casting right away, but the singer soon persuaded him that he had what it would take to bring the character to life on screen.

"He had read the script so many times that he knew every single beat of it at that meeting," Grandage recalled. "He knew other people's lines; he knew all of his lines. He knew why he wanted to talk about it, why one scene worked this way and another worked."

Rogers, who is also a producer on the film, found another reason why Styles is perfect casting.

"This story is about two people that are in love with Tom, slightly obsessed with him," he noted. "Harry – the world is so transfixed on him, on his every move."

The film itself is an all-too-timely tale for today's world, which Rogers said is fraught once again with anti-LGBTQ+ legal persecution.

"Unfortunately, we see what's going on in Supreme Court, what's going on in Texas, going in Florida, in different places in the world," Rogers told Vanity Fair. "The world moves forward slowly and then there are very ignorant people that want to send us back to the '50s."