Alexander Skarsgard delves into kink in Cannes film 'Pillion'

Reuters

19-05-2025

CANNES, France, May 19 (Reuters) - British director Harry Lighton wanted to dispel preconceptions about kink with his feature debut "Pillion," featuring Alexander Skarsgard, he told Reuters at the Cannes Film Festival.
Set in London, Lighton's romantic drama explores the submissive relationship between Colin, portrayed by Harry Melling, a shy traffic officer who lives at home with his parents, and Skarsgard's Ray, a handsome biker with a mysterious past.
Eager to meet Ray's demands for domestic obedience, Colin begins to discover what his partner describes as an "aptitude for devotion". Their relationship is consensual, and its terms are clear.
Lighton told Reuters he had wanted to make a film about submissive relationships for some time, so when Adam Mars-Jones' "Box Hill" novel came along, he jumped at the opportunity to create an adaptation.
"There's a lot of surface preconceptions about kink and the challenge of digging beneath some of those appealed to me," he told Reuters on Sunday.
The film is peppered with moments of comedy so as to, in Lighton's words, "lighten the load" and "riff on some of the tropes of romantic comedies and see how they map onto an atypical submissive/dominant relationship."
Melling and Skarsgard said comedic moments were often inadvertently caused by "clumsy and awkward" blunders on set.
"In reality there are a lot of awkward moments when you change position," Skarsgard told Reuters.
"Just by leaving in those awkward transitions and stuff makes it feel real but it also is kind of funny because you're not used to seeing that on screen."
Melling, known for portraying Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter series and a chess champion in "The Queen's Gambit," told Reuters he was relieved the audience laughed during the film's world premiere on Sunday.
"The weird thing about doing a movie is you don't really know if it is funny at the time of doing it," he told Reuters.
"Pillion" is competing in the festival's second-tier Un Certain Regard category, alongside Harris Dickinson's "Urchin" and Kristen Stewart's "The Chronology of Water."