When someone has an acting career in the sharp ascendancy, casting directors lining up to offer starry roles and a newly-crowned label as Hollywood’s latest It Boy, it’s unlikely that they’d then opt to take a break from the screen for an entire year. Nor would they probably be advised to by their agents.
But that’s exactly what Harris Dickinson — one of the industry’s fastest rising faces — did.
After shooting wrapped on “Babygirl” in early 2024, he went straight into prep on “Urchin,” his directorial debut. “I didn’t work as an actor for a year,” he explains to Variety. “I had no choice. There was no way I was going to be able to shoot this and work on other things. Of course, things came up, but I was just committed to this.”
But his commitment to “Urchin” has now brought Dickinson to the Cannes Film Festival, and just three years after he made a breakout splash leading the ensemble cast of Ruben Ostlund’s Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness,” playing a one half of a model couple whose luxury cruise holiday goes comically awry. Competing in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, he’s among a group actors premiering their first features from the director’s chair, a starry group that also includes Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson.
“It makes a lot of sense to me that they’ve decided to make films,” he says. “Especially when you look at the work they’ve done — it’s clear that they have a real interest in cinema.”
At just 28 years old and a relative newcomer to the industry by comparison, Dickinson may not have the same body of work as either Stewart or Johansson. But a desire to direct was there long before his name was in lights — and even before he started acting. In 2021, before “Triangle of Sadness” turned him into a star, he premiered his short film “2003” at the London Film Festival. Produced by Archie Pearch, who he’d met several years earlier, “2003” became the first film from the duo’s Devisio Pictures. “Urchin” – which Dickinson also started writing before “Triangle of Sadness” (and would work on during the production) — marks Devisio’s first feature.
Starring Frank Dillane, the film — which was already generating buzz before Cannes — follows a troubled but charming young man on the streets of London whose efforts to get his life in order are hindered by his own self-destructive tendencies. It’s captivating, yet unorthodox and experimental in parts — and even stars Dickinson in a small role. It’s also a subject matter that Dickinson says is close to his heart.
“I’ve people close to me struggle with quite cyclical behaviour and I became interested in the psychology of that, and it made me want to tell a focussed character study with someone at the center dealing with that,” he says. “I wanted to tackle it in a nuanced way and bring humanity to that journey.”
To get that nuance right, Dickinson he said he “invited interrogation” and “scrutiny” into the script, and from a variety of avenues, including probation services, mental health groups and addition specialists. “That’s absolutely fundamental, in my eyes, to grounding it and securing itself as something that is a) coming from a place of truth, and b) trying to do it justice.”
It should also be noted that Dickinson has long been volunteering for causes connected to homelessness, spending the first lockdown helping out at a makeshift shelter and setting up a London branch of the homeless charity Under One Sky. Experiences from these — and the “different people I’ve met along the way” — helped add authenticity to the story of “Urchin.”
The film “was definitely not an easy shoot,” claims Pearch. “We spent the majority of it on the street, late at night — and there was the sheer amount of locations and the complexities of the script.” For director of photography, they brought on board Josée Deshaies (“Passages,” “Saint Laurent”) who, despite her body of work, had never actually set foot in London. “But she was such a support to us and also brought this new lens of London. We were really intrigued by the idea of someone that had never shot in London or been to London.”
With the film now complete and getting arguably one of the biggest stages for its launch in Cannes, Dickinson is next getting back in front of the camera to continue that upward acting trajectory he put on hiatus a year ago.
In one of the most anticipated projects in development, he’s playing John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ quartet of film about The Beatles alongside fellow fast-risers Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan and Joseph Quinn. There’s very little he’ll say about the project, except that his Liverpudlian accent is “coming.”
But he will say that, once filming is complete, as he did with “Babygirl” he’s planning to get straight into into the director’s chair again for his next feature, marking at least another year off screen. So how do his reps at Gersch feel about one of their star talents continuing to block out extensive diary slots?
“They knew that wanted to make films. I said that when I first signed with them — that I wanted to do this before acting. So they’ve been behind it and supported ‘Urchin’ from the start” says Dickinson. “But maybe they would have liked the odd job to pop in whilst I was doing it.”
