Harry Melling’s identity as Edgar Allan Poe was hardly known to the Pale Blue Eye director when he cast him in the role.

Although Harry Melling has an impressive filmography—one that includes several Harry Potter movies and Netflix’s blockbuster The Queen’s Gambit—writer and director Scott Cooper, of The Pale Blue Eye, was unaware of all but one of Melling’s roles when he chose the English actor to play a young Edgar Allan Poe.

“I was only familiar with his work through Liam Neeson’s portrayal of the paralysed performer in the Coen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I had just seen that one thing, and Harry is amazing “Cooper recently gushed to Collider about Melling’s range as an actor.