Robbie Rogers he had finally fulfilled his boyhood dream of playing professional football, first as a member of the Columbus Crew in Ohio and then as a member of England’s Leeds United football team. But he kept his private life and the fact of being gay a secret: «My experience in sports has been that you can’t be gay. The only person I knew about was Justin Fashanu, who committed suicide, ”Rogers says now, looking back at that time. “I was struggling with who I was. I hadn’t had a love affair of my own. I was thinking about regrets and where I would be in 10, 20, 30 years ”.
While he was in Leeds, someone gave him a copy of My Policeman, a 2012 love novel by Bethan Roberts. “It was a bit like my coming out,” he says, “I really think the book found me.” The story, set in Brighton in 1957, follows a policeman named Tom Burgess who is gay but lives in a society where it is illegal to be. He begins dating a teacher named Marion, but also embarks on a secret romance with a museum curator named Patrick Hazelwood. Forced to repress his true feelings, he decides to marry Marion and, as tensions rise between the two spouses, Patrick’s life falls apart.
It’s a powerful story of forbidden love, regret, and living without being yourself. Rogers, who came out publicly in February 2013, has read that book multiple times over the years and eventually shared it with her then-boyfriend, the prolific producer. Greg Berlanti (they got married in 2017). The two teamed up with Sarah Schechter, partner of Berlanti Productions, to produce the project and adapt the novel into a film.
The end result is an overwhelming love story, played by three bright stars – Harry Styles, Emma Corrin And David Dawson, as these preview images show – which captures the stifling grip of social obstacles. It took about eight years to make, but for Rogers, it’s as if the film, which Amazon will release in theaters in the US and UK on October 21 and stream worldwide on November 4, comes out at the right time. “Unfortunately we see what’s happening in the Supreme Court, what’s happening in Texas, Florida, in different places around the world,” says Rogers about the recent anti-gay laws Don’t Say Gay and others like it. “The world goes on slowly and then there are very ignorant people who want us to go back to the 1950s.”
My Policeman he jumps between two time periods: the 1950s, in which Tom (Styles) finds himself managing the love triangle with Marion (Corrin) and Patrick (Dawson); and 40 years later, when Tom’s strained life (Linus Roache) and Marion (Gina McKee) gets complicated when Marion agrees to host Patrick (Rupert Everett) after he has had a stroke.
When the director Michael Grandage, a prolific British theater director, began looking for the trio of young actors to interpret the story set in the 1950s, Styles was not on their radar. His team then introduced himself to Grandage saying that Styles had read the script and was very interested in the film.
Grandage met Styles in his London office and was immediately impressed with the pop star. Styles, best known for being part of the boy band One Direction and for his successful solo career, had not yet done much in the world of cinema, having made his acting debut only in the war film. Christopher Nolan of 2017, Dunkirk. But Grandage relates that Styles introduced himself to that meeting as a fully formed actor: “He had read the script so many times that, at the time of the meeting, he knew every single line of it. I found it incredibly impressive. He knew the other people’s jokes; he knew all his lines. He knew why he wanted to talk about it, why one scene worked this way and another worked in another, ”says Grandage.
Styles’ career on the stage and the huge fan following he has amassed also made it clear that he and Tom have a lot in common. “This story is about two people in love with Tom, slightly obsessed with him,” Rogers points out. “Harry – the world is so fixated on him, on his every move.”
And apparently Styles’ limited experience as an actor worked well for this part, says Grandage: “Because he didn’t do much, he didn’t develop the ability to work out tricks or even lie. He can only do things sincerely and as he knows how to do them, “he says, comparing his naturalistic work to that of a young man Albert Finney or Tom Courtenay: “They just bring themselves into the role, and it seems like the way they do it is very simple, and Harry had that,” she says.
Although there has been a diversification in the types of romance coming to the screen (including the recent release of the gay romantic comedy The island of fire), conversations about who should be cast for the lead roles in a film like this are still ongoing and nuanced. Rogers and Grandage said there were several discussions about casting the three stars and the importance of the LGBTQ + community being represented: “We thought it would be wonderful to make a film like this and have at least some people who could talk about one. authentic experience for themselves, ”says Grandage. Since Patrick is the most open character about his sexuality, Grandage says it was important to find a couple of actors who “were able to bring something of themselves and also talk about it,” and they found him with Dawson, with whom Grandage had. worked several times in the theater, and Everett.
Corrin was cast before the successful season of The Crown was published. Marion is a relatively progressive character; with Corrin, who declared himself non-binary last July, the creative team has found a person “who cannot be ignored,” says Rogers.
As for Styles, who made headlines for his gender-bending fashion but doesn’t talk much about his sexuality, the goal was to choose someone who could deal with the character’s inner turmoil: “The whole point of Tom is that he is a confused character. This is made more problematic by the fact that he is a cop and that his career is in defending the law. And the country’s law at the time was about everything he feels“The complexity of this situation is something that anyone who would have played the younger Tom and the older Tom had to somehow understand and absorb,” says Grandage.
Grandage and the cast had about three weeks of rehearsals, a process that he said went very smoothly: “It was very, very easy, because all three of the youngest actors are very open: they don’t make acting difficult. and they don’t make the filmmaking process difficult, ”says Grandage. “They came with an open mind, eager to please each other. They were there for the others ».
Rehearsals also gave the cast the chance to work on the film’s sex scenes. Grandage says they were carefully choreographed to keep them from being itchy: “to literally show something about ‘making love’ in the broadest sense of the word, something that was choreographically interesting and not just some kind of hard sex.”
Grandage was inspired by Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, in which the body language is “very sculptural,” and he involved an intimacy coordinator to help the actors feel comfortable during the more sensual scenes, those between Tom and Patrick. The most heartbreaking part of My policeman, says Grandage, “is that these two men, when they are together, appear to be free. And then when he has to make love, or a sexual act, with his wife, he doesn’t seem to have that freedom, even just in body language “.
Despite the presence of a stellar cast and a unique story, Rogers says that the making of My Policeman it wasn’t easy. “I don’t want to be specific [con i nomi]… but I think for the past eight years we’ve always heard the more political versions of ‘it’s going to be hard to do’ or ‘nobody’s going to watch it’, ”he says. So, seeing it finally hit the screens will be particularly sweet for everyone involved.
Although My Policeman is particularly relevant, after all it is a story of love and letting oneself go to love. It’s a story that has helped many, like Rogers, find their way to their true selves, and he hopes this film can do the same for others. “It’s never too late to have a romance,” says Rogers. “Do not allow regrets to weigh you down: there is always hope.”
Source: Vanity Fair
