It may shock you to learn that Alexander Skarsgård, star of True Blood and Infinity Pool and who’s been walked along a red carpet on a dog leash, can’t abide boring. “I’m terrified of run-of-the-mill stuff,” he explains. “Middle-of-the-road stuff. Normcore stuff. Generic characters make me nervous. They make me insecure.” But a sub-dom romcom about a smoldering, well-endowed biker and the tiny barbershop quartet singer who loves him? Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! “It’s pure joy,” Skarsgård continues. “It’s funny, sweet, tender and awkward. With just the perfect amount of penis.”
Alrighty then. The film is called Pillion, and stars Harry Melling as Colin, whose isolated existence in a small English village is upended by the arrival of Skarsgård’s Ray, who likes leather and silence, and for his lovers to be of an eternally devoted bent. Harry Lighton, the first-time director behind the movie, wanted Pillion to walk a tonal tightrope of outrageous sex and quaint banality. “I haven’t necessarily seen many films that include the very transgressive elements of life sitting neatly side-by-side with things that are sweet,” he says. “But the idea that you can leave an orgy to go and have a Sunday roast with your parents is, to me, very real.”
I meet all three men in London, for a conversation that lunges – much like Pillion itself – between earnest sincerity and phallocentric whimsy. Skarsgård, a man of such bewildering height that he more or less resembles an alluring giraffe, is modestly dressed by his usual standards. Later, at the film’s London premiere, he’ll change into a backless halterneck shirt and lace-up leather trousers, but for now he’s in tracksuit bottoms and a red jumper decorated with the words “SUPER SPEED”. Melling, meanwhile, has the most extraordinary of faces, rammed with sharp edges yet also soft, delicate, and oddly pretty. He tends to rest his head at a low angle while speaking, his ocean-blue eyes gazing upward. He’s like Princess Diana chatting to Martin Bashir.
“For me, there was no sense of fear jumping into the film,” Melling says. “But I’d start explaining the general premise of it to people, and they’d gasp and go, ‘You can’t do that!’.” He remembers telling a family member about it. “And they were like, ‘it sounds like pornography’. And I was like, ‘well… yes and no. But I want to do it.’”
“Yeah, you want to make pornography,” Lighton jokes.
“Exactly,” Melling laughs. “I’m a porn star, mum!”
There was a lot of thought put into what the penis looked like, actually
Harry Lighton
To its credit, Pillion refuses to ever sand down its edges. It’s romantic and heartwarming as a movie, smuggling in real tenderness alongside the provocation, but also allows its queerness to be genuinely subversive. It doesn’t shy away from pup masks, boot-licking or engorged organs, and never judges its characters for their attraction to the outré. Even if it avoids some of the darker brutality of its source material, Adam Mars-Jones’s sexy yet nihilistic 2020 novel Box Hill.
“I didn’t want anyone watching Pillion to feel like it was pandering to a straight audience,” Lighton says. “I remember talking to Adam about it, and he’d say how gay sex scenes in novels tend to be romanticised, or written in the typical language of straight sex scenes. He told me straight writers make their sex scenes smell like truffles and roses. He wanted his to smell like s*** and regret.”
Skarsgård perks up. “That could have been the title of our movie.”
The 49-year-old Swede is no stranger to on-screen freakiness. It’d be weirder if he wasn’t here doing unmentionable things on a picnic table. The presence of 36-year-old Melling is more of a surprise. Not because his first big role was as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films (playing a tragic, limbless naif in the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs put paid to memory of that, surely?), but because he’s never been cast in roles that are particularly raunchy. Was he nervous, I ask him?
“Yeah,” Skarsgård interrupts. “How was I as a lover, Harry?”
“Wonderful,” Melling laughs. “He made me feel very comfortable. Though I have been starkers on stage before.” It was in a production of King Lear at the Old Vic, many moons ago. “And it was fine up until one day when we had a school audience come in, and I couldn’t get through my soliloquy because they just couldn’t handle themselves.”
“Because they were aroused?” Skarsgård asks.
“Because they were laughing!” Melling hoots. “There was such a ruckus in the audience that I couldn’t get my words out. And that was about as low as you can get in terms of nudity and exposing yourself to the public. So everything after that has been fine.” And, he continues, the sex scenes between Colin and Ray are meant to be slightly clumsy and awkward anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered much if he was nervous. “But I was really up for it.”
Was it helpful to be working with someone who is such an old pro at this stuff?
Skarsgård raises his eyebrow. “You mean because I’m a cinematic slut?”
Melling and Lighton erupt into giggles.
“We were just comfortable,” Melling says.
“I can definitely feel a little lost during sex scenes,” Skarsgård says. “But only when I can’t figure out their purpose. Often they can be quite boring on screen – hands grabbing sheets, the arching of the back, that kind of bulls***. But here they’re pivotal moments for Colin: the blow job in the alley, the orgy on his birthday, his first orgasm. They’re important, dramatic scenes, so I went into it all with excitement.”
Less immediately on-board were actual members of the community represented in the film – the blokey leathermen of Britain’s Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club. Understandably, Lighton had to earn their trust. “I was an outsider coming into their world, so it made sense that they were initially a little wary of me,” he says. “It took, I think, a meal or two for them to allow me to sit at the table.” Ultimately, they were all-in, offering advice, suggestions and appearing alongside Skarsgård and Melling in the film. They’ve since attended events and premieres alongside the cast and crew, and even participated in post-screening Q&As sans Lighton and his leading men. “I think they rightly feel very proud of their involvement in the film,” he says. “They’ve taken real glee in it.”
I tell Lighton that one of the biggest surprises for me while watching Pillion is the fact that it was partially funded by BBC Film and, therefore, the taxpayer. Which, in this climate of forensic inspection of how the BBC operates, felt somewhat radical. Having a drag queen on Strictly conjures outraged headlines, for God’s sake. “The film’s obviously gonna push the buttons of a certain pocket of people,” Lighton says. “They certainly won’t watch it, but they’ll hear about it.” He says he’s met others who’ve expressed similar surprise to mine. “People have approached me and said, you know, ‘I can’t believe the BBC funded this’. But I’ve been working with BBC Film for about nine years and I’ve never felt like they’ve tried to clip the wings of what I want to do in terms of it being provocative, or its politics or its ideology. I’m sure it’s very different in different departments of the BBC, but over at BBC Film they’re pretty open-minded.”
It’s why, for instance, they took no issue with a scene in which the screen is (briefly, I suppose) filled by an extreme close-up of Skarsgård’s pierced member – a prosthetic, everyone is quick to confirm. “I was put in touch with your, um, dick man,” Lighton says, to a suddenly very quiet Skarsgård. (Again, he’s an old pro at this stuff.)
“There was a lot of thought put into what the penis looked like, actually,” Lighton continues. “The piercing says everything about Ray. It says that he’s a well-experienced member of this community. It says that he has an edge. Those details were important to me. And it was a way of telling the audience something about this character who doesn’t tell you very much about himself with, you know, his mouth.”
Skarsgård, who hasn’t said anything outrageous in a few minutes, cracks a smirk.
“Right,” he says. “Instead he uses the mouth of his penis.”
‘Pillion’ is in cinemas from 28 November
