The ‘Drive’ Scorpion Jacket Finally Got a Sequel

Charles Melton still remembers the first time he saw the Drive jacket—the silver satin bomber with the scorpion on the back that, for better or worse, has become a menswear moodboard staple since the Nicholas Winding Refn film hit theaters in 2011. “I remember the feeling of wanting to get that jacket,” the actor says.That jacket—and the film, which became a cult classic almost on arrival—helped solidify Ryan Gosling as a genuine movie star, giving him an onscreen garment nearly as mythic as James Dean’s red windbreaker in Rebel Without a Cause.Great costume design expresses “the visual language of the essence of the character,” Melton says. “And I think in Refn’s films there’s a feeling. When we think of Ryan Gosling in Drive in that jacket? It’s just… it’s so cool.”Now, Melton has a cool Refn jacket of his own. The 35-year-old, who recently received an Emmy nomination for his turn in Beef season two, is the male star of the Danish filmmaker’s new film Her Private Hell. It’s a hypnotic, sexy, sometimes startlingly violent thriller that is soaked in neon and often defies narrative logic—in other words, it’s a Nicolas Winding Refn joint.As Private K, an American GI looking for his daughter in the hellscape of post-war Japan, Melton is a mysterious, menacing presence, who at one stage single-handedly fends off a yakuza-style gang fueled by nothing but pure, righteous rage. And like Gosling in Drive before him, the performance marks the most compelling proof yet of Melton’s movie-star aura.“Refn said, ‘This character is an amalgamation of all the characters before you,’” Melton says. “It’s Ryan Gosling in Drive and Only God Forgives. It’s Mads Mikkelsen in Valhalla Rising and the Pusher films. Being a part of that lineage as an actor was pretty exciting for me. And I think it’s really cool to say that my first superhero film was with the auteur Nicolas Winding Refn.”Partway through Her Private Hell, after a brutal fight leaves him shirtless and bloodied, Private K slips on a glorious leather jacket accented with chainmail. It feels like something straight out of a Kenneth Anger film, splitting the difference between a lawless midcentury biker gang and a gnarly ’70s New York S&M club, giving Melton’s character a kind of heightened, almost theatrical masculinity.“The exterior of these worlds that Nick creates—the costume and the design and the color—serves as a container for these characters,” Melton says.The film’s costume designer Jane Marshall Whittaker understood the high bar that had been set when she saw that the script required a leather jacket. “Of course I’m aware of the Drive jacket,” she says with a chuckle. “I thought, okay, this is going to be a challenge. What to do here?”Based in Copenhagen, Whittaker scoured the city’s vintage market in search of the right silhouette. “I was going to strange vintage shops on different islands, little vintage shops hidden away in the middle of nowhere in a forest in Denmark and finding all sorts of stuff,” Whittaker says. In the end, she had about a hundred different leather jackets, ending up with a model from roughly the late ’60s for Melton’s big scene.“For us, [the jacket] was so powerful, because it harnessed this feeling of the night, the armored warrior, the outsider, the rebel,” she says. “I especially liked the armored aspect, the chain mail, because it also illustrated what his character was going through. I wanted to make Charles look a bit larger than life as well—which was difficult, because Charles is almost godlike in his being.”Whittaker remembers a frenzy on set the day the actor appeared in the jacket. “I said to Nick, it’s a little bit Elvis, isn’t it? And I also mentioned George Michael,” Whittaker says, laughing. “I don’t know why that came into my mind.”Courtesy of NeonWhittaker and Refn have been close collaborators for decades, as far back as the 1996 cult classic Pusher. Over the years, they’ve developed a creative shorthand. “We don’t talk so often with specifics,” she says. “A lot of it is actually instinctive. I knew we were dealing with a kind of space-retro feel. I knew that we were in a sort of giallo world as well, in some ways—and they were often very big with the beautiful ’70s fashion references, so I wanted to harness some of that.”Melton remembers being blown away by the authenticity of every detail. “Even though you didn’t see the shirts or my military dog tags underneath the clothing, everything that I wore from head to toe—even the underwear and the socks—were what GIs wore in the ’40s and ’50s,” he says.Despite over a decade in the business, the actor still has wide-eyed enthusiasm for the work that costume designers do. “There’s such a spiritual element to clothes,” Melton says. “There’s something that happens—an expression of self within the self—with what we wear.” He remembers being knocked out by the costumes in The Matrix as a kid. “Trinity’s leather suit, the glasses that Neo wears in those black trench coats, Morpheus and his black leather jacket—the costume design on that was spectacular.”Still, if he’s keeping it real, he says his own style icons might be… cartoons? “For some reason, Hey Arnold’s coming to my mind,” he responds, laughing, when I ask for his favorite onscreen looks of all time. “You remember that cartoon? Hey football head!”Melton appreciates the repetitive simplicity of cartoon wardrobes. “I think that’s kind of my style,” he says. “My publicist and my sister give me a hard time all the time. They’re always like, ‘You’re like a cartoon character! You wear the same thing every day.’”Which means that, with a look as indelible as his Her Private Hell rig, we might never see Melton in anything else.