Harris Dickinson’s day job is being John Lennon. The actor has spent the better part of the past year rehearsing for Sam Mendes’s four-part Beatles biopic, expected in theaters in 2028. Occasionally, though, Dickinson, 29, plays hooky from the band to nurture his side hustle as writer and director. “The odd day off feels naughty,” he tells me on a recent Monday morning, “like I’ve got a sick day from school.” Urchin, his first feature film, will premier that evening in London, and he’s a bit jumpy as he rummages through the cabinets of his office in search of coffee and tea accoutrements. Now that he mentions it, he does sort of look like an errant schoolboy, the hood of his gray sweatshirt pulled up over his head, its cord tied in a bow like a shoestring. On the big screen, Dickinson is a stolid hunk, but in person he’s scrawnier. His hair is longer than the crew cut worn in his most famous role, as Nicole Kidman’s younger lover in 2024’s Babygirl — now chopped bluntly at haphazard lengths, like Lennon in the mid-’60s.
“I think it might be quite awful,” Dickinson says, referring to the freshly prepared tea he sets down on the table. “It’s not the optimal milk that I like. I like fucking normal milk, and this is some almond shit.”
Dickinson is anticipating tonight’s event with an air of disquiet; he keeps messing with his hood and running his hands through his hair. He’s been working on Urchin for about five years, and at Cannes the film received a five-minute standing ovation and won both the International Critics Prize and Best Actor for its lead. But Dickinson is still sorting out how to discuss the movie’s delicate subject matter. Urchin is a painstaking close read of life on the street, following a young homeless man named Mike (played by the British actor Frank Dillane) as he travels the cycle of addiction, crime, imprisonment, rehabilitation, and relapse. Early critics have called it “compassionate,” which might sound like a euphemism for treacly or didactic. But the film’s empathy is matter of fact, achieved in part through an almost documentarian naturalism. Dickinson tracks Mike through his often isolated affairs — trying on clothes at a thrift shop, carefully laying out a bed of wooden planks and cardboard, jerking off in his room — then, at unexpected moments, punctuates the story with surreality: brief psychedelic sequences that both advance the plot and seem to provide windows into Mike’s inner life. In one passage, the cameras follow water down a shower drain and into a cavernous subterranean universe; in another, Mike tumbles through a sky of stars. “I don’t know how to explain without sounding mad,” Dickinson says of the scenes. They depict “capabilities of the mind, with daydreaming or drugs or escapism or fear.” The result is almost miraculous; Urchin muddies the blank, distant empathy we tend to feel for people living on the street.
For two years, Dickinson had trouble coming up with the money for the film. Financiers generally don’t put a lot of faith in Hollywood actors turned directors. “I think people thought, It’s a cliché, it’s entitlement, it’s opportunistic, it’s naïve,” he tells me. But the forces that make Dickinson so potent onscreen were the same ones that would eventually make Urchin so vivid. There’s a push-pull to him, a magnetic duality: stoic and deeply sensitive, anxious and self-assured.
People are drawn to Dickinson’s looks — square jaw, deep-blue eyes — which doesn’t sit right with him. He grew up as “quite a fat kid” called Harry, not Harris, he says. The youngest of four children of a single mother who cut hair for a living, he became fixated on his body at around 16. “I started to work out,” he says, “and there was a period where I consciously wanted to lose weight, and get strong, and have a sense of masculinity. I wanted to build my body, and fight, and have a defense.”
At 17, he was prepared to join the Royal Marines, but he backed out at the urging of a theater coach from a London drama school. Dickinson began training at the academy in his teens while he and his friends shot YouTube shorts and skate videos. He saved up to travel to Los Angeles for two pilot seasons but failed to get any work. Back in the U.K., he returned to his job at a hotel and wrote his first film, a short about a young military man about to be deployed on his first tour of duty. (The hotel would later show up in Urchin: Mike, newly released from prison, takes a job there as a line cook.)
Dickinson’s short was released in 2021, and it was well-liked enough that his contacts at the BBC, who’d helped fund it, wondered if he was working on anything longer. By then, he’d broken through in acting — cast in Eliza Hittman’s 2017 film, Beach Rats, about teenage boys in deep Brooklyn — and begun the script that would eventually become Urchin.
In its earliest form, it was a 150-page epic: “It was a two-person story line, and there was a big romance in there,” Dickinson says. Homelessness played a smaller part. Industry advisers said it was too ambitious and encouraged him to pare it back.
As Dickinson picked up more meaty roles — in Joanna Hogg’s family drama The Souvenir Part II, replacing Robert Pattinson; in Trust, Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy’s FX series about the Getty family — the Urchin script stayed on his mind. In 2020, Dickinson had started volunteering at a safe-haven organization for the unhoused in Walthamstow, the neighborhood he grew up in. The charity work pulled him toward the character of Mike in his script, and Mike motivated the charity work. When the safe-haven organization shut down, he joined another — now conscious that he was there for his art as much as to help.
“Do you know what?” Dickinson says, interrupting his story. “I’m reluctant to talk about my work with these charities. I hate when people in my position bang on about their philanthropic work. It looks so gross, and they get the spotlight instead of the other people” — people who commit their lives to that work. “I’m someone who has the luxury to be able to pop in and out.”
In 2022, Dickinson appeared in the polarizing black comedy Triangle of Sadness, by Swedish writer and director Ruben Östlund, whose films he loved. As a model named Carl, stuck in a relationship corrupted by microcelebrity and Instagram view counts, Dickinson ticks with exasperation and sarcastic logic, his jaw clenched, his eyes wide and staring. When the Dutch director Halina Reijn set out to cast Kidman’s love interest in Babygirl, she locked in on Dickinson. As Samuel, the lowly intern at the tech firm helmed by Kidman’s character, he plays an eerily confident kid who lures his boss away from her marriage to a loving, age-appropriate man (Antonio Banderas) and becomes the conduit for her midlife sexual awakening.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
The movie turned Dickinson into a Gen-Z-coded sex symbol: Samuel is sexually enlightened, both forward and soft. He embraces awkward fantasies with an almost alien self-assurance. The unique energy coming off Dickinson in the role seems to have been hard-earned — a result of his years spent tying the knots of his own masculinity and then eventually untangling them. “I got to an age,” he tells me, “where I was like, Oh, actually, I don’t know if I want that hard shell. It’s part of growing up and priorities changing.”
The fan response to Babygirl — and Dickinson’s infamous scene swaying (shirtless) to George Michael’s “Father Figure” — was feverish, sometimes feral. Dickinson started to feel a little queasy about it. “Didn’t like it,” he says bluntly when I bring it up. “It took me a lot of work to embrace who I was and to forget about the kid who was not happy with himself. And then it probably went too far.”
On the set of Urchin. Photo: Deviso Pictures
Shortly after Urchin began filming in 2024, Dickinson nabbed the Lennon role, cast alongside “bandmates” Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, and Joseph Quinn. His agent was bringing him endless piles of potential projects, and he was rejecting plenty — including roles playing “posh boys” and characters in superhero movies. “The superhero thing is something I’m not really interested in,” he says, taking a long pause before offering the qualification that most actors seem almost legally beholden to: “for right now.”
In directing the film, Dickinson says, he was exacting, even neurotic, and ambitious in a way that, looking back, was a little green. He’d written 36 different locations for shooting. “I asked a lot of everyone for a very small budget,” he would explain at the premiere. “I really tested people.”
To find Mike, Dickinson and his producers toyed with the idea of street-casting, a practice made fashionable by big-swinging indie directors such as the Safdies and Sean Baker. But it turned out not to align with the ethics of the film. “I’ve been in films where people are streetcast, and it’s tough. There’s a level of aftercare required once you bring someone into this industry,” Dickinson says. “I think it’s precarious.” In auditioning actors, he knew what qualities he didn’t want. “It couldn’t just be a stereotype of British cinema — just unruly and hard,” he says. Mike is boyish in his own way, in a state of arrested development, equal parts sweet, silly, and crushing. We see him, in multiple scenes, in the fetal position. “Frank just understood that right away,” Dickinson says. He’d seen Dillane in the zombie series Fear the Walking Dead and thought, “This guy’s really interesting and kind of odd.” At the Urchin audition, arriving with mussed hair, Dillane improvised moments of tai chi and yoga.
For his part, Dillane has said that working with Dickinson was “joyful … like we were kind of just kids playing.” Dickinson made space for experimentation but was also decisive. “That clarity of knowing what he wanted, always,” said Dillane at the film’s premiere, “is actually quite rare.”
For all of his own mutability and tenderness, Dickinson wouldn’t have worked for the role of Mike — his presence is too big. This is made clear a few minutes into the film, when he appears as Nathan, one of Mike’s friends in the street scene, towering and boisterous. The center of gravity shifts to him immediately. Dillane as Mike, meanwhile, at times becomes almost invisible. Dickinson actually wasn’t supposed to appear in the film at all, but an actor dropped out last minute. It was Dillane who encouraged him to fill in. The experience of stepping in front of the camera, Dickinson says, was “awful.” There was too much that needed tending to back behind the monitors.
Late in our conversation, he recalls a conversation with a Spanish journalist a few days before our meeting. “On one hand you’re Hollywood and on one hand you’re Urchin,” the journalist pointed out. “Well, of course,” Dickinson says, looking back. “But what do I do about that? I can’t dampen the one side of it.”
“I took a year out from acting to make Urchin when most people would argue this is a foolish time to do this,” he continues. “For me, it was unavoidable. Not to sound like I’m part of some divine intervention, but I had to do it.” Dickinson is now slowly drafting a new script in his slivers of downtime, hoping he can execute it once he’s finished with the Beatles project. He’s become so immersed in the world of the new film that Lennon has started popping up in his dreams. “It could be very easy for me to misinterpret that for connection or understanding, but really it’s just proximity,” he says. Creating his own characters on the page is a respite from that particular intensity. “I think at a certain point, it’s healthy for me to have something else on that side that I can be nurturing and processing.”
Toward the end of our conversation, Dickinson gets twitchy again. Later, he’ll be shuttled to various promotional obligations. “I’m just not cut out for it,” he says. “I’m deeply embarrassed.”
“It’s a small price to pay,” he adds quickly, wary of complaining. “But also, I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe I shouldn’t be an actor.”
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the October 6, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the October 6, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.
