The Pale Blue Eye Director Hardly Knew Who Harry Melling Was Before Casting Him As Edgar Allan Poe

Harry Melling has an impressive resume under his belt—one that includes several Harry Potter films and Netflix’s quarantine hit The Queen’s Gambit—but The Pale Blue Eye writer and director Scott Cooper was unfamiliar with all but one of Melling’s works when he cast the English actor as a young Edgar Allan Poe.

“I’d only seen his work as the limbless performer that Liam Neeson carries around the American West in the Coen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. That was the only thing I’d seen of Harry’s, and he is remarkable,” Cooper told Collider in a recent interview, raving about Melling’s range as an actor.

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Cooper Shares How Melling’s Character Changed to Accommodate the Actor Playing Poe

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Based on a 2003 novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye follows the future famous author as a young cadet called upon to help solve a murder mystery at West Point Military Academy in 1830. With dozens of drafts discarded before the final film was written, Cooper shared that one of the biggest modifications between versions was adjusting the role of Edgar Allan Poe to be informed by Melling’s performance—all while reconciling the “entrenched ideas” about the author with a younger version of himself.

The Pale Blue Eye is now playing in select theaters, and the gothic murder mystery will be available on Netflix beginning January 6.