Harris Dickinson on ‘Urchin’

As Harris Dickinson was cementing himself as a star in projects like Triangle of Sadness and The Iron Claw, the actor was quietly at work on the script that would become his debut feature, Urchin.

The film, which debuted to acclaim at Cannes this past May, is a heartfelt and surprising drama about an addict named Mike, who, after punching and robbing a man who offers to help, emerges from prison on a tentative path to rehabilitation.

“I don’t know exactly what the first seed was,” he says on a video call this month, the day the film premiered in New York. “I just know that I wanted to tackle a character like Mike and gain access into someone that I guess doesn’t always have that kind of story.”

Dickinson has carved out a unique career for himself as a performer. Yes, he’s currently in the middle of playing John Lennon in Sam Mendes four part Beatles biopic epic, but he’s best known for taking fascinating, challenging, and occasionally dangerous turns in the likes of Beach Rats and Babygirl. Urchin, which releases in theaters this Friday, is as adventurous as his on screen work. Dickinson goes into unexpected territory, pairing dreamlike sequences with a verité depiction of a man caught in cycles of self harm. He wanted to avoid familiar narratives about life on the margins.

“It was really about, what have we seen, particularly in British cinema, in this genre?” he says. “That’s potentially what we try and avoid at each turn. And I think the permission to be able to take it into a slightly more surreal tone and a slightly more comedic tone—that was key for all of us. To be like, okay, look this isn’t a film of a specific ilk. We’re not weighed down by anything here.”

To accomplish Dickinson’s admittedly naively ambitious plans, he sought actor Frank Dillane to play Mike. Though Dickinson had seen Dillane act before—he played Tom Riddle in Harry Potter in the Half-Blood Prince and starred on Fear the Walking Dead—he cast him off an audition. Though Dickinson didn’t have full financing at the time, Dillane committed.

Through their Zoom screens, both actors reveal a similar cool and cheeky sense of humor. Blinded by the sun pouring in from a window, Dickinson dons shades for our chat. Dillane, clothed in an Adidas track suit, smokes a cigarette. Dickinson also plays a small role in the film, an acquaintance of Mike’s from the streets. It’s a part he stepped into at the last minute when another actor dropped out. “I had to talk him into it,” Dillane says. “This was a hard fought battle.”

They joke when I ask how they work together that they were “lovers,” and Dillane cracks that “Harris was very hands on in terms of my derriere,” but they grow serious when talking about their commitment to telling Mike’s story.

“When I did that first audition I realized the story Harris was trying to tell was an incredibly delicate one and one that kind of encompasses so much more than homelessness,” Dillane says. “It really is a study about what it is to be human in its broadest sense.”

There was practical research that went into the preparation. Dickinson says he had a “real dialogue” with people in prison reform and employed advisors with lived experience with being unhoused and struggling with addiction. “I’ve also had that close to me,” he adds. “So it was like trying to capture it in a way that I knew people that had been through it or people that had been in proximity to it hadn’t always felt they’d been given in film.”

Even before starting to collaborate, both Dickinson and Dillane had worked with UK-based charitable organizations for vulnerable communities, Under One Sky and Single Homeless Project, respectively. Together they also visited prisons, as well, but Dickinson didn’t want to make his story about institutions, instead focusing on Mike’s internal life. That much is evident in the reading material he gave Dillane to prepare: Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

“That really blew the whole thing open for me, quite profoundly,” Dillane says. “This kind of existential fight with oneself and also this sort of lack of God and there being a lack of a God implies there is a God. Harris really captures that beautifully with the dream sequence stuff.”

Dillane also spent as much time on the street as possible, noting how exhausting the experience of being outside all day without a refuge is. “I come from a very middle class background and have a very supportive family around me so there were certain things that I felt I had to get a more physical understanding of,” he says. (His father is actor Stephen Dillane of Game of Thrones.)

Certain scenes around London were shot with a long lens, which meant, in Dickinson’s words, that “the world around Frank could carry on.” At times, Dillane would be equipped with a radio and Dickinson, from afar, would instruct him to interact with nonactors.

“Not being acknowledged is something that is very painful for people because, you know, they’re sitting there right in front of you,” Dillane says. “I have this tendency, we all do it, of getting on with our day and looking away when someone is walking down the train all cut up and starving, we pretend they don’t exist and to feel that firsthand was interesting.”

Allowing Mike to have moments of levity was also crucial to both Dillane and Dickinson. “The humor is very much a part of the streets,” Dillane says. “It’s us stuffy middle class people who kind of take life a little bit too seriously.”

Dickinson is not flip about the responsibility he took in telling Mike’s story, while also pushing the boundaries of the genre.

“I never wanted it to be just a drug story or an addiction story,” he says. “Because ultimately it’s more about why are we addicted to stuff? Why do we fall back into substance use as a dependency, right? Or any sort of thing as a dependency?”

And the flights of fancy that are within it? That’s just how Dickinson’s brain works.

“I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer,” he says. “I don’t think I’m capable of functioning in a super realistic, pragmatic, linear way. I’ve always been intrigued by fairy tale and escapism as well. We are tracking someone who has an extremely complicated mind. In many ways the language of the film lends itself to something slightly more abstract.”

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