Harry Melling knows the secret to being a good boot-licker. “You want to give a decent, satisfying, sexy lick,” says the 36-year-old actor, who has the umlaut eyes and nasal tones of Nicholas Lyndhurst. “Once you get to the toe-cap, you need to make sure they can really feel your tongue through the leather.”
Melling, barely recognisable from his childhood role as wretched Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, learned this new skill while preparing for the award-winning BDSM romcom Pillion. He plays Colin, a timid traffic warden who becomes the willing submissive to a taciturn biker named Ray. Listening intently to Melling’s boot-licking tips in this London hotel room are his Pillion partners-in-kink: Harry Lighton, the film’s 33-year-old writer-director, whose flat cap and smirk lend him a roguish look, and Alexander Skarsgård, 49, who plays Ray, and is dressed today in a slobby ensemble – red sweatshirt, blue tracksuit bottoms, black shoes – that fails to spoil his pin-up prettiness.
