Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Seven years ago, Harris Dickinson was at the ceremony for the 27th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards, an early pitstop in Hollywood’s awards season. Dickinson, an unknown 21-year-old from Walthamstow, east London, was nominated in the Breakthrough Actor category for his role as a closeted teen in the Brooklyn drama Beach Rats. He took his mother as his date. The only issue came when they realised that Nicole Kidman was there as well. “Mum was a little bit tipsy, and she said, ‘I’ve got to go speak to her,’” says Dickinson, now 28. “And she made a beeline. I was like: ‘Oh my God.’ I didn’t see my mum for, like, 10 minutes…” Eventually Mrs Dickinson resurfaced. “She said, ‘Nope. Couldn’t find her anywhere.’” I said, ‘That was probably for the best. Sit down. Have your dinner.’”Today, Dickinson’s mother would have a lot more to say to Kidman – her son has just made a film where the actress falls head-over-heels for him. Babygirl, directed by Holland’s Halina Reijn, is a witty, weird, roleplay-themed romance between Kidman’s Romy, a high-flying, high-profile CEO, and Dickinson’s Samuel, the maverick intern who locates her secret desire to be subjugated. Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde and, memorably, a large glass of milk co-star.The film has got buzz: Kidman won Best Actress for her performance at the Venice Film Festival in September. It’s also another significant gear-shift for Dickinson. Following that first success with Beach Rats, he has worked consistently ever since, accumulating parts in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, The King’s Man and The Iron Claw. Charlotte Regan directed him as a feckless single father in her acclaimed British indie, Scrapper, in 2023. “Harris is just incredible,” she says. “As soon as you see him on screen, you’re like: yes, this is a film I want to see and a character I want to be with.”Fashion has come calling too – for the past 18 months he has been a face of Prada. “Harris is a wonderful young actor,” say designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, who work on Prada’s menswear together. “We believe that his talent and personality are a perfect match for us.”Most, however, will recognise him from Ruben Östlund’s 2022 satire Triangle of Sadness, where he played Carl, a stunningly gormless model whose trip on a luxury cruise ends in chaos. An opening scene of the film, where Carl grins and pouts on demand for a casting, went viral, and it’s an apt calling card for Dickinson: it shows his willingness to play up the tension between his pretty-boy good looks and his wonkier tastes. Anybody expecting Babygirl to cement Dickinson as this season’s smouldering lead man should know that the actor wants no part in it. “‘I don’t want to be sexualised! Have some respect!’” the actor mock-moans of his current status. “‘How dare you reduce me to a thirsty… thing!’” Dickinson is sitting in the small square office of his production company in east London. He sports long brown hair, a brown chequered sweater and lilac combats that, he realises, are stained with mustard. Whereas photographs and films show him as classically beautiful – think renaissance prince stranded in a skate park – in real life he is moony, goofy, forever working an elastic band around his hands. Babygirl may well confound people as it probes the subjects of female desire, power and domestic happiness. Dickinson is perfectly cast as Samuel, a suave oddball: handsome, surprising and hard to read. “I loved working with Harris,” says Kidman. “He is so intuitive, open and tender. He has so much depth and range, and a willingness to explore. He is an old soul.” Adds Reijn: “He has a unique quality of being incredibly vulnerable and confident at the same time. He has a very authentic sense of humour and a super-fast brain.”“I am proud of it, and I am interested in the conversations that have come up around it,” says Dickinson. Early descriptions of it as an “erotic thriller” seem to miss something though. “I think it’s got an erotic part and a thrilling part,” he says. “But I think ‘erotic thriller’ reduces it a little bit. When we started the film, my constant fear was, are we hitting tropes? Are we doing things that are just an expectation of this genre, whatever this genre is? And how do we evade that? So much of it is based on what we’ve seen, or what we’ve consumed. I was always trying – and Halina was – to reroute that, and trying to find the humour and the nuance.” What’s more, he claims, “it’s not that kinky” (although there’s the odd thing that happens that could surely pass the test). There’s “not one harness, not one whip, not one gag”. Ultimately, he says, “forget the power dynamics: it’s just about two people connecting in this weird way. I kind of treated it like any other…” He searches for the word, then laughs in relief. “Love story! Yeah. It is.”In person, Dickinson is amiably wilful. “I’m not great with authority,” he admits sheepishly. “I don’t like being told what to do by anyone. Even my people around me know that, and they try to come at it from different angles. I do what I want to do.”Dickinson’s mother was a hairdresser, his father a semi-professional boxer and a social worker; he has three siblings. Owing to his mother’s work, there were always women in the kitchen talking and gossiping. “My family are all very good storytellers… and I’ve grown up with very different understandings of what you can do, and who you can be.” He believes his mother also wanted to be an actor, “and she got advised against it. So I think that’s why she was always very supportive.” As a teenager, he was conflicted. “I didn’t enjoy school very much, I didn’t love college very much. I didn’t finish college…” For a while he was torn between pursuing acting and being in the Marines – he was in the Marine Cadets, the precursor to joining the corps. The Marines? For somebody who doesn’t like authority? “Well, it was hard for me! Exactly. I was always being told off!” Looking back, he says, “I don’t really know why I did it… I was intrigued by it as a group, as a tribe. I wanted structure. Maybe I was looking for identity. I was also a bit fat.”At the same time, he went to “an amazing theatre school outside of normal school. It was run by actors, and it was just normal people. Working-class peers.” Eventually, he says: “I found my own way.”Aged 19, Dickinson went to Hollywood to do pilot season with no professional CV to speak of, using the money he’d saved from working in a hotel bar. “I just wanted to work. I wanted money. I was watching films and I wanted to be in them. I was like: ‘Why am I not in that film?’” The irony being, he points out, that he didn’t get any jobs from two years of doing pilot season, and only finally got the role in Beach Rats when he returned home, self-taping the audition in his bedroom. When he was then nominated at both the Gothams and the Independent Spirit Awards “it was a fairly accelerated thing, but it felt like it was the perfect time, because it was like, ‘Great!’ About time I got a job, you know?”Previous profiles in the British press have fixated on Dickinson’s working-class upbringing, as though he were a unicorn in an industry filled with privileged Etonian types. When I mention class to him, his shoulders drop. “I feel like all I’ve ever been asked about is class. And for a while, it was like, hang on a minute, why am I a spokesperson? But clearly I don’t mind talking about it, because I’ve always launched into tirades about it. So it’s probably my own fault, because I’m passionate.” That said: “I don’t like sitting there and being like, ‘Oh! I’ve had it hard,’ and all of this shit. Because I’ve been incredibly lucky as well.” More positively, he does believe that things are changing. “I think opportunities are increasing, and people are getting better access to the industry. I think we’re in a culture where everyone is holding everyone accountable. There’s no room to hide.”Dickinson is already writing and directing his own films. “Acting is amazing, but there are times when you’re waiting around a lot, and I think my mind prefers to not wait around.” His debut, shot last summer, has yet to be given an official title or a release date. “It’s about this guy called Mike who is on and off the streets, essentially battling his own trauma and his behaviour. I’ve put a lot into it. I’m excited to get it out there,” he says. “It’s grounded in social realism, and it’s heavily researched. I spent a lot of time with that community, with certain causes. I’ve had people close to me deal with certain issues in the film.” The main aim, he says, is simply understanding. “I think we’ve very quick to label someone an addict, or lazy, or destructive, when clearly we’re having a mental health crisis. And particularly men, for some reason, fall between the cracks in homelessness more than women.”Post-interview, he is heading to a pub quiz in east London. He lives around there, with his new fiancée, the pop singer Rose Gray. “I’m engaged to be married,” he says. They don’t have a date set yet, but, “I’m excited”. His level of fame is bearable at the moment – he doesn’t get recognised so much. “It’s growing a little bit, but I don’t mind. Normally people are very nice.” He tries to be sanguine about what is around the corner (he already has a tribe of fans who call themselves the Dickheads). “You can only fight it for so long,” he says. “I was talking to Andrew Garfield, who said that when he got super-famous from Spider-Man, he grew a beard and he dressed badly, and he rejected it so much… But I don’t find that to be in line with my morals about self-love. I mean taking care of yourself – loving yourself, in a way. I was a really chubby kid,” he reminds me, “and I didn’t like the way I felt. I fought hard to not be a little chubby kid any more. I wanted to be… a smooth little criminal!”As we get up to leave, I note how many tattoos Dickinson has. Small scrawls proliferate all over his body – on his knuckles, his arms, and “some awful ones” on his legs. He has been accumulating them since the age of 19, doing a handful of them himself. “That’s a 59,” he explains of one. “That’s a horseshoe. That’s a diamond. That’s a mistake – I didn’t finish that one. That’s Donnie Darko…” He’s partly dismissive about them. “It’s like scribbling. They’re shit tattoos, I know.” But he is obviously proud of them too. He even offers to give me one as well. “What do you want?” he says, suddenly flashing that wide, incorrigible, slightly scary grin. “‘Babygirl?’”
