NEW Forbidden passion
Harry Styles plays a gay copper in 50s Brighton…
AMy Policeman Available: Friday 4 November Genre: One-off drama
s a singer, he’s recorded hit albums, dominated the singles charts and had sell-out tours, but now Harry Styles is carving out a career as an actor.
He plays police officer Tom Burgess in the moving story of a dangerous love triangle. Set in the 1950s, when homosexuality was illegal, Tom and Marion Taylor (Emma Corrin) fall for each other after he teaches her to swim off the coast of Brighton, where they live. Conforming to social norms, they soon get married.
But when Tom meets museum curator Patrick
Hazlewood (David
Dawson), it awakens repressed desires in him and the two men embark on a secret affair that has huge consequences for them all…
‘Just as Tom starts to find some freedom with Patrick, he becomes even more trapped because it’s this incredible thing he has to lie about,’ says Harry.
‘His life as a policeman is one of oldfashioned masculinity.’
Different world
The film follows two timelines and the trio are reunited in the 1990s, when the older Tom is played by Linus Roache, while Gina Mckee is Marion and Rupert Everett plays a seriously-ill Patrick. Society has changed, but the traumas of what happened 40 years earlier still hang over them...
‘Tom deceives Marion not out of maliciousness but from an emotional immaturity and not knowing how to speak honestly,’ says Harry. ‘If Tom, Marion and Patrick had been able to take that leap to be completely honest in 1957, they might have had a chance at more happiness.’