Harry Melling may be playing American short story writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe in Netflix’s The Pale Blue Eye, but he wasn’t introduced to the Master of the Macabre’s work through schoolwork or even through research for the role. Instead, he first encountered Poe’s chilling poetry the same way millions more before him had — through the portal to the past and future known as The Simpsons.
“I remember the first time I heard of Poe was on a Simpsons episode,” Melling stated during an online interview with Gold Derby. “It was a very famous one where I think maybe someone turns into a raven … I can’t exactly remember. But that was the first I heard, oh, who’s this Edgar Allan Poe character, this icon of American literature?”