‘Queen’s Gambit’ Alum Harry Melling To Play Edgar Allan Poe Opposite Christian Bale in Scott Cooper’s ‘The Pale Blue Eye’

EXCLUSIVE: Harry Melling, best known as Dudley from the Harry Potter franchise, is headed from Hogwarts to West Point as is set to play one of the more iconic writers of our time. Sources tell Deadline, Melling is set to play a young Edgar Allan Poe in the Netflix and Scott Cooper murder mystery The Pale Blue Eye. The film is a passion project of Cooper, who has tried making it for more then a decade, and also stars Christian Bale as a veteran detective tasked with solving a series of murders that took place in 1830 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Bale’s detective partners with a detail-oriented young cadet (Melling), who will later become the world famous author the world knows today. Cross Creek is financing and producing.

Cooper will direct and adapt the screenplay from Louis Bayard’s novel of the same name. Bale will also produce joining Cooper, John Lesher, and Tyler Thompson of Cross Creek Pictures. This marks the third collaboration for Bale and Cooper who previously worked together on the thriller Out of the Furnace and the western Hostiles.

Following his work in the Harry Potter franchise, Melling has stayed busy and built a career on more adult fare most recently in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, where he played Anya Taylor-Joy’s adversary turned ally.

He will next be seen opposite Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which will be released by A24 and Apple later this year. That film reunites Melling with Coen following his breakout role in the Coens’ Oscar-nominated The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He also recently wrapped production on the independent feature, Please Baby Please, in which he stars opposite Andrea Riseborough, Demi Moore, and Karl Glusman.

Other recent credits include Netflix’s hit action film The Old Guard opposite Charlize Theron and Chiwetel Ejiofor; the psychological thriller The Devil All the Time starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson. He is repped by Paradigm, Curtis Brown and Goodman, Genow, Schenkman, Smelkinson & Christopher.