This week, Neil Calloway looks forward to the former boy band star appearing in Christopher Nolan’s next film…
This week the first set photos of Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming war film Dunkirk emerged, as well as the news that Tom Hardy had signed up to appear in the film. He joins a cast that includes Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy and Harry Styles.
There was some dissent when Styles – better known as a member of One Direction than an actor – was announced as part of the cast. It’s an unusual move, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that Christopher Nolan does.
While Nolan obviously has a regular troupe of actors he uses in different films – Murphy, Hardy, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway and Christian Bale have all appeared in his films more than once – he also makes some unexpected casting choices.
Nolan has a habit of resurrecting the careers of actors who have long languished in the bargain bin of the DVD section of your local supermarket; Rutger Hauer, Eric Roberts, Matthew Modine and Anthony Michael Hall in the Batman movies and Tom Berenger in Inception for example. He’s casting people he grew up watching and putting them in the first mainstream film for years.
He also does a nice line in surprising cameos; David Bowie as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, and Matt Damon stranded in space in Interstellar, a year before he did almost the same thing in The Martian.
Nolan also puts actors in his films who had early success but have failed to reach those heights again; Lukas Haas crops up in Inception and Wes Bentley plays a pivotal role in Interstellar.
There is also the spectre of singers appearing in films, which has a chequered history for every David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth and Mick Jagger in Performance (both Nic Roeg films, incidentally), there are a dozen performances from otherwise decent musicians that leave a lot to be desired. The Star Wars prequels were bad enough without the appearance of Bono as a Jedi (as was rumoured at the time) and *NSYNC, who shot scenes that were ultimately cut from Attack of the Clones.
It;s highly unlikely that a director with Nolan’s clout would have been pressured by the studio to cast Styles due to his fan base, but This Is Us, the One Direction concert film (directed by Morgan Spurlock, not known for helming such fare) that was released in 2013 grossed more than $68 million at the box office; not bad for footage of a concert tour that has already made money. Where We Are, their second concert film was released for two days in October 2014, making an average of $4,500 per screen. Those numbers aren’t to be sniffed at and his presence will surely help Dunkirk‘s box office and go some way to recouping what will undoubtedly be a huge budget.
Dunkirk is a British war story; for too long the story of the Second World War has been told from an American perspective, so whoever stars in the film it should be worth seeing; Christopher Nolan has a proven track record of casting choices that make little sense at first glance but work on the big screen, and ultimately, in a film that will feature young British men, Harry Styles is a pretty good fit.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
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Originally published May 29, 2016. Updated March 2, 2020.
