Harry Styles has two films in the fall festival season, Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which has its world premiere tonight in Venice, and My Policeman alongside Emma Corrin, which bows in Toronto.
The pop star admits he still thinks of himself as an amateur, in his growing Hollywood career.
“What I like about acting is I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing,” he told reporters at the Don’t Worry Darling press conference ahead of the premiere, adding that he considers music and acting “opposite in a lot of ways.”
“Making music is a really personal thing,” he said. “There are aspects of acting where you’re drawing from experiences a bit, but for the most part you’re pretending to play someone else. That’s what I find the most interesting about it. They can aid each other in a way. Any time you get to view the world through a different lens, it can help to create whichever way it goes. I find it really different. I think the fun part is that you never know what you’re doing in either one of them.”
The 28-year-old was speaking alongside his co-stars Gemma Chan, Chris Pine and Wilde, with whom he is rumored to be in a relationship, and fielded the vast majority of questions from the press (impressive considering the controversies that have erupted around the film).
“It’s fun to play in worlds that aren’t necessarily your own,” he said of acting. “This [Don’t Worry Darling] world is supposedly so perfect. It was fun to play pretend in it. It’s like driving fun cars. We were lucky to have that world built so well around us, so we could play in reality instead of pretending everything was nice.”
Despite Styles’ comments, reports from the press conference were mostly dominated by Wilde’s refusal to address the “tabloid gossip” surrounding Don’t Worry Darling and reports of a fallout with the lead star Florence Pugh, who didn’t attend, and the blocking of a question relating to Shia LaBeouf.
