Alexander Skarsgård Is the Dom, Harry Melling the Sub, and Pillion Their Kinky, Sweet Love Story

Few movies have achieved are both as emotionally resonant and deeply horny as Pillion. Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from writer-director Harry Lighton. While helming his feature debut, Lighton left a message pinned to his bedroom wall, intended to serve as a reminder before rushing to set every morning: “Don’t sacrifice the real for the sake of the laughs—or the sake of the gasps.”

There are laughs, and gasps, aplenty in Pillion. The A24 film, adapted from the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, stars Harry Melling (of the Harry Potter films and The Pale Blue Eye) as Colin, a meek traffic warden who lives with his parents and sings in a barbershop quartet on the side for fun. He meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the leader of a local gay motorcycle club, and falls head over heels. Ray brings Colin into his particular world, where pillions—that is, those who ride the passenger seat on the motorcycle—are designated submissives. Colin doesn’t know much about any of this, but he goes with the flow because Ray is, well, hot—but also enigmatic and direct and, in his own odd way, protective.

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What unfolds is a frank, kinky, utterly idiosyncratic first feature from Lighton. He deftly depicts a sexual relationship that some might deem extreme or unusual as the engine for a moving rom-com (with, yes, some dashes of trauma skirting the edges). This is not to say he tamps down on the specifics of the sub-dom dynamic—Pillion comes complete with orgies, cock rings, and boot-licking. But as Melling and Skarsgård dig into some of the most intricately wild material of their careers, you wonder if these two crazy kids are going to make it: leather, lube, and all.

Ahead of Pillion’s Sunday premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, Lighton and his stars explained to VF just how they pulled that off.

Vanity Fair: Harry L., how did you come to this novel and then decide to make your first feature out of it?

Harry Lighton: I was sent it during the pandemic. I’d been working on a different project for a good five years, and that was set in Japan, and obviously when the pandemic happened, the wheels came off of that pretty quickly. Eva Yates, who’s one of the executive producers and the head of film at the BBC, sent me the book and said, “I think you’ll like this.” Which maybe says something about what she thought about me. But I read the book, and I remember thinking that it was very funny and bracing and thought-provoking.

The previous project which I mentioned had been about sumo wrestling. I was quite interested in setting my first feature within a male subculture, and then queering that subculture somehow. And there was a really interesting quality to Colin’s narrative voice in terms of the way he processed events which, from I guess a majority perspective, might be seen as borderline traumatic.

Let’s talk about bringing these actors aboard.

Lighton: Firstly, I saw Harry sing in The Devil All the Time, and he’s got a great voice. But then across various roles there was this very interesting magnetism, which wasn’t your typical alpha male magnetism. I found he demanded attention when I was watching him.

Harry Melling: When we first started talking about Colin, we spoke about how this thing shouldn’t ever come from a traumatic place. He should always be filled with a stubborn optimism. We thought that was such a lovely thing to carry through the film; to stretch it out, to see how long that can live before the cracks start to appear. We’re with Colin experiencing, for the first time, all these things.

So actually, the most important thing I kept thinking to myself is, “Just listen. Listen to these events that are happening to him, and literally experience them for the first time.” I went on this big pillion trip to this Pride festival in Cambridge, and it was as if I was Colin. I was being taught all these new things, being told what a successful boot-licking would look like. The journey would be to watch this person open out into this world, and that was what I kept coming back to if ever I thought I was getting ahead of myself.

Lighton: What I wanted from Colin—and Harry—was that magnetic beta quality. What I wanted from Ray was not necessarily an inverse, but another version of that where you had someone who had all the surface of the world’s hottest biker, and then an unknowability. Wherever I’m talking about Succession or even his interviews on talk shows, Alex is an interesting combination of things. He’s very playful and mischievous, and the roles he’s chosen reflect that.

Alexander Skarsgård: When I got a little brief from my agents about the project, biker and sub-dom, it just sounded quite intriguing to me…and from our first conversations, he just felt a lot of confidence in me and his vision for the project. I definitely wanted to put on the leather gear and jump into the trenches with it.

In the film, most of the members of the biker gang in the movie are basically playing themselves—they are members of GBMCC. I’m forever grateful and indebted to them for their generosity and support and patience. They told us about their lifestyle, and how they socialize and about these gatherings, when they go out riding together, down to details in terms of the outfits, and the dynamics between the subs and the doms and what that would look like. I credit everything to those guys.

The film is obviously graphic, and sex is a key engine of the storytelling. Harry L., this is also a relatively commercial film. So how did you figure how much you wanted to, essentially, show?

Lighton: I remember trying to ignore the practicalities of wanting it to get seen for as long as possible. Because so much of Colin’s experience through the film is driven by transgressive sex, and the way in which he experiences that, I didn’t want to be too hands-off or prudish in the handling of that. I thought that that might feel like it was a judgment on the part of me as the filmmaker, and I wanted to leave it to the audience to be able to decide at which point sex strays into something which is unpalatable to them rather than to give them that information by keeping too much off screen. Once we got into the nitty-gritty, it emerges that you can’t just chuck a load of dicks on screen.

But we shot some stuff which was more explicit, and it wasn’t the case that I was told to remove it out of the cut. I chose to remove it out of the cut because I think it was always important to me that the provocation of it didn’t override the sentiment, the experience.

For the actors, what was your comfort level filming the sex scenes going in?

Skarsgård: You can’t just apply the kind of the sub-dom structure to every relationship. I talked to some people who are in sub-dom relationships, and certain aspects of Colin and Ray’s relationship rang very true to them. And others, they’re like, “Well, I know people who have that kind of relationship…” It was just important for us to figure out what worked for us, in between Harry and myself.

I knew that it was going to be graphic, and Harry was very clear on his vision for it—when and how nudity was going to be depicted. I felt that it really served the story, and it made sense to me. I was very, very comfortable with all that. We had a really terrific intimacy coordinator named Robbie [Taylor Hunt] who was there with us the whole way.

Melling: Alex is just the most generous, dreamy scene partner, so what could have been quite a daunting experience couldn’t have been more different, really. When you sort out the choreography of it, which is often the most difficult part—you sort out what everyone’s doing, where their hands are going—and then once action is called, you’re in the world of Colin and Ray.

Skarsgård: I fell in love with Harry from the first second I saw him. He’s just the sweetest, nicest, loveliest human being. I felt comfortable going as far as we needed to go in these situations with him. I also discovered a lot of things about Colin and Ray’s relationship that I didn’t anticipate discovering when we first started working on it. There were these tender, beautiful moments that just happened organically, and some moments that were weird and some moments that were funny. But he was incredibly game, very brave in just throwing himself out there.

Harry L., how did you work with the intimacy coordinator and others to figure out how best to depict this kind of sub-dom relationship?

Lighton: I was speaking to Robbie three months before we started production, about the way in which we were going to approach it. So it wasn’t the case that he just turned up and did the blocking of the scene at that moment. What was key was that whichever way we achieved it, it didn’t feel like the symbol of sub-Dom sex—that it felt like there was a reality to it. And that meant embracing moments of clumsiness or discomfort as well as the highs of the sex.

A lot of the supporting biker-gang people we cast from both the GMBCC and the kink world—we definitely leant on them to tell us, like, what lube you might be using if you were doing an orgy. I wanted anyone who watches it from the kink community, or whatever community, to feel like what they’re watching is accurate.

Melling: In a way, that made it easier. It wasn’t close-ups of hands. It felt very real. This wonderful community of supporting actors was so valuable. Just in terms of taking me through what a successful boot-lick would be so that I knew how to do it…not successfully.

Skarsgård: There are orgy scenes in the film, and with a combination of actors and non-actors with different levels of experience in that field, it was great to have Robbie there to kind of help and guide the team.

Lighton: It was the moments of mundanity that I most took away from that [research]. There are 80 men in leathers getting onto bikes at the beginning of the day, but then an hour-and-a-half later, you’re having a pork pie and talking about what people thought of Kylie’s Glastonbury performance. And the GMBCC are not definitionally a kink-based or a sex-based organization. It’s for queer people to go biking. So the bike gang in our film, and the way pillions and riders are delineated, that’s very much a fictional creation.

Skarsgård: The way it’s set up in the script, the audience knows as little about Ray as Colin does, and we kind of maintain that kind of level of mystery around the character. In terms of the specifics of the sub-dom relationship, he’s very clear and very upfront with Colin about what he wants, and that also creates an interesting trajectory for their relationship as the story and the love relationship evolve.

The film has a surprising sweetness to it that might not be what you expect in a film with this subject matter.

Lighton: There’s a knee-jerk reaction when you hear about BDSM—that it’s going to be either very ironic or it’s going to be very severe—and I knew that I didn’t want to lose the fun of it. But I also didn’t want to create a distance between the audience and Colin and Ray through irony. That’s probably where the sweetness comes through. The film is meant to be funny, and I want people to laugh. But it’s not meant to be funny in a way which detaches you from the people in front of the camera.

Melling: It grounds it in an interesting way. It’s familiar, and then suddenly we’re somewhere else. That tone is constantly what Harry L. was playing with.

Lighton: No matter how atypical your sex life is, the likelihood is that you’ll have some aspect of typicality from family life or something like that—those two things can live side-by-side. You can go from a family lunch to an orgy, and those two things can not feel incompatible. The hardest thing for me was allowing the characters to exist as extremes without turning them into cartoons—and allowing for that to be quite broad humor at times without compromising the realism.

This transcript has been edited and condensed from two interviews for clarity.

This story is part of Awards Insider’s in-depth 2025 Cannes Film Festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the event’s biggest names. Stay tuned for more Cannes stories as well as a special full week of Little Gold Men podcast episodes, recorded live from the festival and publishing every day.

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