COMING ATTRACTIONS

After Trailer: Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Josephine Langford Bring Harry Styles Fan Fiction to Life

It’s like Fifty Shades, but for “new adults.”

Feb. 14, 2019

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YouTube/After

Fans of After, an upcoming movie based on a novel of the same name written by Anna Todd, just received a Valentine’s Day treat in the form of an official movie trailer.

Starring Josephine Langford (Katherine Langford’s sister) and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin (nephew of Ralph Fiennes and Joseph Fiennes), After focuses on a high school freshman named Tessa Young who realizes she’s not so in love with her high school sweetheart and has suddenly fallen for the mysterious, rebellious, tattooed Hardin Scott.

Fiennes-Tiffin may be familiar to audiences for playing a young Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince a decade ago, but now he’s playing the British love interest in a movie for young adults. The grown-ups in After are icons in their own right—Selma Blair plays Tessa’s overbearing mom; Peter Gallagher and Jennifer Beals play Hardin’s parents—but they take a back seat and let the rising young Hollywood stars take over for this one.

The best-selling novel on which After is based has what some might consider to be surprising origins (but not that surprising, if you consider how the Fifty Shades of Grey series got started and then became an international phenomenon). The story was apparently born from Harry Styles fan fiction that Todd published on Wattpad in 2013. She eventually changed the name Harry Styles to Hardin Scott after securing a deal with Simon & Schuster. In the film, the resemblance Fiennes-Tiffin bears to Styles is a bit of a stretch, but he does have a few nautical tattoos similar enough to the singer’s own ink.

The book also apparently falls under the burgeoning crossover genre of “new adult” fiction (not to be confused with “young adult” fiction), which supposedly targets those ranging in age from 18 to 30, and is less about high school drama and more about the quarter-life crises that develop when deciding what to do after college.

The first trailer for the film already has fans of the original book talking. There are smashed flower vases, punches being thrown, a scintillating game of truth or dare (in which Tessa is dared to make out with Hardin), and lots of brooding teens—or maybe they should be considered “new adults.”