With the release of his debut solo single "Sign of the Times" on Friday, I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that I'll be spending most of my waking hours speculating about my favorite One Directioner. This new interview with Harry Styles talking about Dunkirk makes that especially easy. There's something about his enthusiasm in discussing the movie and his eagerness to learn on the set of the Christopher Nolan film that makes it seem pretty likely that he's open to following up the World War II project with more film work.
As we all know, Dunkirk represents Styles' first foray into film acting. We won't know how the 23-year-old has managed in his debut role until Dunkirk is released on Jul. 21, but one role that he's decidedly not inhabited is Full-Of-Himself Big Ego Guy.
I base that assessment on the way Styles gushes about being on set in an interview with SiriusXM's The Morning Mashup Show.
Honestly, it was an amazing experience. I’m a master Christopher Nolan fan. It would have been something I was excited to watch, had I not been involved anyway. But it was really cool to be the new guy, and kind of learn. It was a completely different challenge, which I really liked. It was a lot of fun. It was tough, but it was good fun.
When you're as famous as Harry Styles is, I can imagine it would be easy to slip into the mindset that the movie is lucky to have a big name like you. But Styles doesn't seem to have fallen into that trap at all. Indeed, he's expressing just the opposite: how lucky he is to have been a part of something as cool as Dunkirk. He's treating the film like a learning experience, which is I think the exact right attitude to have when you're trying something new. Everything out of his mouth suggests to me that Styles is open to taking these life lessons on to another film project, if one happens to crop up for him.
He just sounds so positive talking about what a challenge it was, and how neat it was to be the new guy out of his depth in a new experience, that it sounds like he has a taste for this sort of thing now. He's effusive over Christopher Nolan in particular, so I could certainly imagine the two of them working together again in a heartbeat. But I also imagine there are other directors as well whose work Styles has admired.
If Dunkirk provides him with an opportunity to dive in with them as well, it sounds from this interview like he'd take it.
