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Best known for playing outsiders and underdogs, Harris Dickinson is bringing his directorial debut, Urchin, a portrait of class and survival, to the Melbourne International Film Festival. By Andy Hazel.
Actor Harris Dickinson tuns to directing with Urchin
It’s late afternoon on a hotel balcony in Cannes, and Harris Dickinson is having his photo taken. Between the blitz of white flashes he jokes with Frank Dillane, the star of his film, Urchin. They are dressed in matching pale coral silk shirts over tight black singlets, the camera catching the pair’s easy camaraderie. Dickinson finishes up and crosses the balcony in a loping stride to deliver an easy handshake before taking a seat.
Urchin is Dickinson’s directorial debut, screening in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section. A slice of London realism about a rough sleeper attempting to get his life on track, its premise sparked doubts among cinephiles used to actors-turned-directors delivering projects rich with self-mythology. Could a handsome young actor who some are tipping to be the next James Bond credibly write and direct a film about poverty? But for Dickinson, this world is familiar terrain.
“I live in London, and there’s this immense… polarity going on all the time,” he says. “It’s all around us. Class gaps are huge and they’re close to each other. It’s strange and it’s always been strange.
“I grew up in a very sociable household, we had a lot of different people coming in and out all the time. It was really colourful, really exuberant. My mum was a hairdresser, and my dad’s a social worker, so I was always hearing about the people they’d met or worked with, and that inspired me. The people I love and am inspired by are people trying to tap into different corners of society, and my area of London offers so much to someone like that. It’s got a real edge to it. You have to be careful sometimes, but if you’re curious, it offers a lot.”
In 2013, the BBC conducted the Great British Class Survey and reclassified the old tripartite system of lower, working and upper class into seven categories: from the cultural and economic “elite” at the top to the “new affluent workers” to the “precariat” at the bottom. As Dickinson explores in Urchin, social markers such as accent and education still carry weight, especially in the arts, just less overtly than they once did. As poet Carol Ann Duffy wrote: “It must be dreams that makes us different, must be / private cells inside a common skull. / One has the other’s look and has another memory.”
Dickinson lives “a couple of miles” from his childhood home in East London. “Growing up, my dream was to maybe be a camera operator,” he says. “I just loved filming stuff. In the beginning I was making skate videos with my friends and short dramas and sketch shows, stuff that I would get off the ground with help from family and friends, but I was never in them. Acting was always a secondary thing for me. It’s something I love very much, but it overtook my first love, which was filmmaking.”
As a teenager, Dickinson spent evenings at performing arts workshops run by a community school in Walthamstow and weekends volunteering in the Royal Marines Cadets. At 17, he began studying film and theatre at college where a film studies tutor Dickinson dismisses as “a bit of a dick”, repeatedly reminded him he lacked the education and references required to properly understand cinema. Discouraged, Dickinson dropped out of school and refocused on his military aspirations until a lucky break saw him cast in a production at London’s National Theatre in 2014, which secured him an agent.
Between auditions Dickinson took on a string of menial jobs to fund a trip to Los Angeles, where the rejections continued, this time in quick succession. Undaunted, he returned to London and began volunteering at a local community refuge. When the council shut down the refuge, Dickinson began working with Under One Sky, a charity that provides welfare checks, hot meals and services to people living on the streets, work that would eventually form the inspiration for Urchin.
In 2016, with only his bedroom wall as a backdrop, Dickinson recorded an audition tape that won him a lead role in Eliza Hittman’s independent film Beach Rats. Dickinson played a Brooklyn teenager struggling to reconcile his clandestine queerness with his friends, a gang of low-level criminals, and family. It was a role that relied a lot on Dickinson’s physicality. Hittman’s film premiered at Sundance, where it earnt critical acclaim, and Dickinson was recognised with a Gotham Award for Best New Actor and an Independent Spirit nomination. With his new profile, Dickinson continued to play characters striving to balance class, gender and social expectations with their true nature.
After Beach Rats, he played a self-absorbed model in Triangle of Sadness (2022), a troubled wrestler in The Iron Claw (2023), and an ambitious intern caught up in corporate and sexual power games opposite Nicole Kidman in Babygirl (2024). In each of these roles, the idea of performance is never far away.
Over the next three years, Dickinson will be kept in the spotlight by another role about a young man who used performance to break free from class hypocrisy, John Lennon, in Sam Mendes’s ambitious four-film Beatles biopic.
Urchin is a deeply compassionate film that follows Mike, an articulate, unhoused man who lives eternally in the moment and struggles with self-reflection. Reviewers have noted the echoes of Mike Leigh’s film Naked. Dickinson – a man with the name of his favourite film, Ken Loach’s Kes, tattooed on his shoulder – isn’t going to argue with any association with a titan of modern British realism.
“As a filmmaker, if you can evoke emotions from people, then normally you’re going to get them to think more deeply about a subject, which in turn is hopefully increasing an understanding of it,” he says. “I don’t like to sit here and say, yeah, we’re changing things or we’re making a difference – a film is like a tiny dent in a huge, huge issue – but I like to think that cinema can start conversations and educate. I’ve learnt a lot through film, especially films by people like Mike Leigh, Shane Meadows and Ken Loach.”
Urchin grew out of Dickinson’s desire to tell stories close to home. One section of the film sees Mike take a job in a run-down hotel kitchen, and in another he picks up litter in a park – work Dickinson knew intimately.
“I worked at that hotel for two years and I was in that kitchen every day,” he says. “I would audition or do a self-tape in the morning and then work an evening shift from when I was 17 until I was 20. I knew when I wrote the script that that was going to be in there. It made sense to me. I worked in the park where we did the litter picking, too. Yeah,” he smiles ruefully, “I was in control of those bins.”
When I suggest this level of fidelity to lived experience might be a bit much, even for Loach or Leigh, Dickinson smiles. “The interesting thing with Loach is that people always sort of paint him as just a social realist director,” he says. “But his films are always provocative and, bottom line, they are always incredibly truthful. Regardless of the subject, regardless of the messaging, they are just well-investigated films. He knows structure and he knows how to build truth.
“There’s this idea that British cinema is only bleak social realism, and there’s absolutely an important place for that, but with Urchin we tried to tonally shift it slightly because my references and my influences are also the more surreal and the more mystical and the more sort of fable-like stories that I really love.”
To ensure his film didn’t fall into well-meaning artifice, Dickinson brought in probation officers, trauma experts, addiction counsellors and people with lived experience. “When we went into production, we invited these people in to interrogate the story and work with our crew and Frank,” he says. “I wanted to make a film about someone who is struggling but who is ultimately struggling against themselves. I’ve had people close to me deal with addiction and the cyclical behaviour that goes with addiction, and I wanted to depict that with humour and levity. I’m not interested in trying to shove messages down people’s throats. I wanted to make something led by the character and the psychology first.”
Dickinson explores Mike’s character through pure cinema – flashes of synapses firing, a verdant cave, bodies drifting through space. These moments are light years from linear, “authentic” portrayals of characters such as Mike or the communities Dickinson drew from to make the film and those who work with them.
“I did my research,” Dickinson says. “I investigated it fully and I wanted to understand it. It still is an issue close to my heart and I feel dedicated to trying to contribute in any way, even if it’s just making a cup of tea, helping a bigger cause. Trying to mobilise in your local community feels like the best thing you can do when you’re feeling out of touch with politics or government.”
When the actor cast as Mike’s itinerant friend and sometime adversary, Nathan, abruptly exited Urchin, Dickinson took the role on himself. In doing so, he continued his pattern of subverting his leading-man looks with the approach of a character actor, vanishing into roles that resist easy charisma. Even when playing high-status characters, there’s an element of vulnerability or unease in Dickinson’s performance. For his film Triangle of Sadness, director Ruben Östlund saw more than 120 actors before casting Dickinson as Carl, the model adrift in a world of luxury and power. Dickinson’s physical performance and emotional vulnerability made Carl one of the film’s few grounded and relatable figures.
Another pattern in Dickinson’s career is his repeated collaboration with women directors. Since Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats, he’s worked with Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir Part II), Charlotte Regan (Scrapper), Olivia Newman (Where the Crawdads Sing), Jennifer Yuh Nelson (The Darkest Minds), Halina Reijn (Babygirl) and Brit Marling (A Murder at the End of the World).
“Whether it’s coincidence or not, I think that a lot of these women … have a deep access to a certain sensitivity, and an understanding and a humour that maybe other people don’t have,” he told journalist Sarah Ward. “I’ll go where they go and I’ll go where they lead me.”
Frank Dillane cites Dickinson’s body of work as a key reason for his performance which, a few days after our interview, would earn him a Best Actor award at Cannes. Dillane brings a physicality and depth to Mike that makes him sympathetic, even when his behaviour makes the viewer wince.
“I trusted Harris implicitly,” Dillane says. “And because he’s an actor, and a brilliant actor, I knew he understood what I was trying to do, and he encouraged it. I’ve worked with incredible directors, but I’ve never led something like this. So, I felt that I had the opportunity to be as untasteful as possible and dig for gold.”
Urchin, for all its groundedness, is not a bleak film. Its tone lifts and loops, leaning into surrealism and texture as much as a sociological authenticity that is clearly born of collaboration around a very clear vision.
“I get to live my dream and work with incredible people,” Dickinson says with a grin. He waves his hand towards the harbour below. “I mean, look at this place. It’s not hard to stay grateful. But I feel an immense sense that I have to give back because I’m being given a lot as well, you know? And I know I still have a long, long way to go.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 2, 2025 as "Class of his own".
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