Please, Don’t Give Harris Dickinson a Standing Ovation

Harris Dickinson has just returned to London from Liverpool, where he’s been preparing to play John Lennon. The baby-faced 29-year-old has faced other daunting challenges in his decade-long career: dominating Nicole Kidman in last year’s erotic drama Babygirl; recreating John Paul Getty III’s traumatic kidnapping in FX’s 10-part TV series Trust; and training with a professional wrestler to play one in The Iron Claw. But prep for Sam Mendes’s much-anticipated set of Beatles biopics has been exhaustive. “It’s the longest I’ve ever spent with a character before a shoot,” says Dickinson.

For the role, he honed his guitar skills, pored over mountains of research material, met the real Paul McCartney, and bonded with his onscreen bandmates—Paul Mescal (McCartney), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr), and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison). Even so, some aspects of Lennon seem unknowable: “He’s such an enigmatic, complex guy. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like I’ve fully figured him out. But that’s okay.”

Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.

Onscreen, Dickinson has gone toe-to-toe with Angelina Jolie (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) and Ralph Fiennes (The King’s Man). In person, though, he’s shy. When 2022’s Triangle of Sadness—the Palme d’Or–winning film that put him on the map—and this year’s Urchin, his feature directorial debut about a drug-addicted drifter, both earned standing ovations at the Cannes Film Festival, Dickinson found their receptions “quite uncomfortable.” For years after he left school at 16, the mostly self-taught actor took unglamorous odd jobs—picking up litter, folding clothes at a store, working at an establishment he once described as “a very shit hotel”—between taking auditions and uploading directorial experiments to the erstwhile platform Vine.

He finds the idea of a theater full of people in formalwear clapping for him to be slightly preposterous. “Imagine the embarrassment of being sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to—times a hundred,” says Dickinson. “That’s obviously a barometer of whether people like your film, so it’s nice. But uncomfortable.” He’s so modest that he actually asked his mother to stop dropping positive write-ups of his performances into the family group chat. Dickinson was raised by a hairdresser mother who took clients in the kitchen of the East London home they shared with Dickinson’s three older siblings. “My daily routine was coming downstairs and immediately being confronted by an elderly lady,” he told The Hollywood Reporter this year. “They’d all known me my whole life, so I’d just roll down in my [underwear] and be like, ‘You all right, Susan?’”

Like Lennon, Dickinson seems slyly unknowable. There’s a stillness and slight hesitation to him as he speaks, offsetting tired responses with a smooth deadpan and half smile. When asked if he ever knowingly deploys his charms, he replies, “Yes. I’m good with old people if I need to be.” But overall, “I don’t think I’d describe myself as charming. Someone that thinks they’re charming is probably obnoxious, is the honest answer.” When Dickinson auditioned to play a male model in Triangle of Sadness, director Ruben Östlund immediately dismissed the actor as being “too shy to really give me what I wanted,” as he told Dazed last year. But within a half hour of improv, Östlund recalled, the actor was screaming profanities “with a full-on authentic volcanic anger. I had never before seen a similar transition.”

Dickinson is also comfortable exploring his characters’ sexuality and secret desires, as he did in his 2017 indie breakthrough, Beach Rats. “I can hide between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” he says of his onscreen disappearing acts. “There’s a very safe, liminal space that I can exist in and be the most annoying or the most confident.” That space allowed for a chemistry so crackling in Babygirl that Dickinson has since been confronted by older women telling him their most provocative sexual fantasies: “There were some deeply inappropriate comments made to me by women after that film. I’m glad it started a conversation and people felt sexually liberated by it. It’s something you can laugh off, but it’s not necessarily acceptable.” I ask whether his emotionally wrenching roles have haunted him afterward—not via lecherous fans, but via his own psyche reverberating the pain of his performances. “There’s no question it can get under your skin and affect your being,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like someone who’s taking himself too seriously, even though I like to take my work seriously. I care about it a great deal.”

Set Design Julia Wagner; DP Shane Sigler; Location Ealing Studios; Groomer Liz Taw; Manicurist Adam Slee; Produced by Casa Projects. For details, go to VF.com/credits.