HARRIS DICKINSON: on the way to BABYGIRL

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Harris Dickinson by Vitali Gelwich for ODDA Magazine Fall-Winter 2020

THE FACES OF HARRIS DICKINSON

"Dickinson has a pale beautiful face, a semi-blank quality, and the sculpted body of a Greek God" - Shiela O'Malley, RogerEbert.com review of POSTCARDS FROM LONDON.

Rewatching Ruben Östlund's TRIANGLE OF SADNESS was part of a personal survey of the cumulatively impressive work of this now 28-year-old English actor, whose roles all have things in common, often involving a young man at a loss trying to figure himself, yet are quite different in specifics. See the GUARDIAN profile of him for a recent overview.

It's predicted that this Christmas, when A24 releases Halina Reijn's provocative BABYGIRL, where he plays a new 20-something assistant of 50-something top corporate exec Nicole Kidman with whom he gets into a torrid and illicit affair, Dickinson will finally become a star visible to all. The lead-up to that event may be a good time to take a look back at Dickinson's career thus far. The fascination of this young actor is the way, as Juan Ramirez wrote in prefacing a 2022 interview in Vogue, he can constantly "complicate his leading-man good looks with a character actor’s commitment to disappearing into a role." Dickinson's filmography reveals a distinctive talent and a remarkablly varied body of work that deserves the kind of greater public recognition it's going to get after Babygirl's December 25 release that is hinted at in the quietly gushy Christmas Day puff piece all about him pubhlished in The New York Times.

In Eliza Hittman's BEACH RATS, where I first saw him in the press screenings of New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center in 2017, he's a young American, partly a tabula rasa, confused, living a double life, who's a macho neighborhood kid, a "closeted Brooklyn jock," one of the 'bros by day but by night a delicious young hunk who connects with gay men he's met online. In 2018 he was in POSTCARDS FROM LONDON playing a male escort who's a fine art devotee - I'd forgotten this one and didn't review it; see Sheila O'Malley's review on RogerEbert.com. Also in 2018 he played the kidnapped 16-year-old John Paul Getty II in the 10-part FX television series TRUST created by Simon Beaufoy, the early eisodes directed by Danny Boyle, with Donald Sutherland, Hilary Swank, Luca Marinaelli and Brendan Fraser. He got very good views: he and Fraser were the most praised. The series seems awafully stretched out, but is strong for its authentic Italian sequences, and Harris is especially charming in the early ones, and appears in all of them.

In James Blake's 2019 COUNTY LINES he appears fleetingly but chillingly as a guy who grooms kids to become drug mules; the filmmaker knew the victims well as a social worker, maybe not this person so clearly, but Dickinson delivers the role of Simon with smooth vernacular menace. This is a grim but eye-opening and knowledgeable film about a phenomenon I knew nothing about.

Despite his striking physical attributes - and yet facial blankness - Dickinson is more of a chameleon and has more of a detached approach to his roles than, say, Andrew Garfield - who he recently did a duo A24 podcast with - was in his twenties. Dickinson seems to have a whole different American voice in the 2023 Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's Hulu/Disney Plus mini-series A MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD, where he morphs from amateur sleuthing partner/lover of Emma Corrin (who he told Garfield is the actor he'd most like to work with again) into famous doomed Banksy-like artist and (spoiler alert) murder victim. Corrin is great. This is a cool, atmospheric thriller-mystery with Clive Owen as the controlling Elon Musk-like billionaire host.

Dickinson has taken minor supporting roles in a variety of films. Like the son of Ralph Fiennes' Oxford in Matthew Vaughan's 2021 prequel THE KING'S MEN, where he does a posh accent, obviously, and gets to wear beautifully tailored suits (and he was once a Diior model) but you can skip this one. Even more disposable is Olivia Newman's 2022 southern courtroom-mystery saga WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, but here he gets to do a down-by-the-bayous drawl. Don't bother. But in between CRAWDADS and KING'S MAN he played his subtly teasing boy-toy lead role in TRIANGLE OF SADNESS. And also released in that year, 2022, he played Richard Attenborough opposite Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell in the frivolous, campy British Agatha Christie spoof SEE HOW THEY RUN (Tom George), set in Fifties London.

So each time, a different accent, a different time and place. He is accumulating experience, learning. In that GUARDIAN profile he says "I’m a silly person. My goal is to have a laugh," and for him, SEE HOW THEY RUN had the requisite silliness. This self-characterization reminded me of young Jean-Pierre Léaud's iconic 400 BLOWS screen test where he says "I'm happy, not sad."

Two other films Dickinson played in in 2023 are very interesting ones, and feature him in the kind of surprisingly different roles Gary Oldman took on in his early films. First is Sean Durkin's physically demanding THE IRON CLAW, where he is a member of the doomed American Von Erlich wrestling family, and he didn't even look much like the other brothers physically, but he got the part and smoothly carried it off. The other one is Charlotte Regan's small British film SCRAPPER, as fun as THE IRON CLAW is tragic, a film about an immature and idle English poor boy who shows up out of nowhere to play the father of the feisty 12-year-old girl he is in fact the father of, unbeknownst to her, whose mother has unfortunately gotten sick and died. Watching Dickinson and young Lola Campbell play off each other is a delight, and this is Dickinson's most charming film.

Dickinson also has a supporting role as a helpful fireman in Steve McQueen's upcoming BLITZ, reviewed here as part of this year's NYFF, its closing night film.

All the films he appears in have been conveniently listed by RogerEbert.com

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HARRIS DICKINSON AS "BILL" IN A MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD

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HARRIS DICKINSON WITH THE LATE CHARLBI DEAN IN TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

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WITH LOLA CAMPBELL IN SCRAPPER

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Harris Dickinson photographed by David Vintiner for the Observer, London, October 2022.