Harry Styles ‘Didn’t Know What He Was Doing’ While Working On ‘Dunkirk,’ And He Loved It

Harry Styles has opened up about making his acting debut in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, admitting that “it was one of the best experiences” of his life and that he actually enjoyed being out of his comfort zone and having absolutely no idea what he was doing.

The former One Direction singer made this admission during his appearance on Dermot O’Leary’s BBC Radio 2’s Saturday Breakfast Show, detailing how he embraced the “challenge” and how he “really loved being the new guy.”

“It was one of the best experiences of my life. Honestly it was amazing, it was a real challenge. I mean, I really loved being the new guy. I loved kind of being so far out of my comfort zone. It felt really good to kind of have no idea what I was doing for a little bit.”

Harry Styles has been discussing his work on Dunkirk while out promoting his latest single “Sign Of The Times,” which is his first solo single since One Direction announced that they were going on a hiatus. Of course, one of the biggest alterations that occurred to Harry Styles before production on Dunkirk was that he had to get rid of his curly hair. In fact, the singer admitted to Elvis Duran and The Morning Show that he was convinced to do just that by his parents, who believed that it made him look more like a soldier. Despite being nervous about losing his hair, he quickly embraced the shorter style.

“I felt very naked. When I first told my parents I was going to be in a World War II film, they thought I was playing a lady on the train station waving the soldiers off, so we had to make the chop. But it was good! It’s very breezy.”

Harry Styles also spoke to SiriusXM’s The Morning Mash Up show about his work on Dunkirk, too, revealing that he had to do a lot of swimming during the shoot, while he also opened up about being such a huge fan of Christopher Nolan. The British director, who also wrote the film, has previously overseen the likes of Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Interstellar, clearly pushed Harry Styles to his limits, too, as the burgeoning thespian admitted that it was a “tough” process.

“I swam a lot for the movie. 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 it was originally announced that Harry Styles would star in Dunkirk, both movie and music fans were a little shocked, primarily because the singer had never actually acted before. But it turns out that Christopher Nolan was immediately impressed by Harry Styles’ skills when he auditioned, and in the end, the singer beat out literally thousands of other actors to land the part. Christopher Nolan made this admission to the Los Angeles Times, confessing that when Harry Styles auditioned he just “had it.”

“When we put the cast together, we had some established names: Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy. But for the guys on the beach, we really wanted young unknowns. He’s not that unknown, but he’d never done anything as an actor before. So he auditioned. I auditioned literally thousands of young men with different combinations of young men. And he had it.”

We’ll get to see what Harry Styles’ acting skills are really like in Dunkirk when the World War II epic is released later this summer on July 21.

[Featured Image by Warner Bros]