Harris Dickinson is thinking about the American dream. "I love the sense of optimism. That you can go there and people will just sort of accept what you're doing, that you're trying something new or want to be someone new," he tells me, sitting a dimly lit room in East London, the light already lost at 5pm on a Monday.
Dickinson is one of the UK's most buzzy actors around right now, fresh off a tide of major projects – Triangle of Sadness, The Kingsman and Where the Crawdads Sing – and acclaimed indies, such as Scrapper and his Gotham Award-winning debut, Beach Rats. Soon he'll combine the two as he stars in The Iron Claw, an A24 production about the Von Erich wrestling family, alongside Hollywood heavyweights like Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White. And if he does move to the US, he'll be one of our best exports.
Dickinson's sun-tinged outlook on the American dream might be due to his recent road trip through the great American Midwest alongside Emma Corrin for their ambitious new TV series, A Murder at the End of the World. The much-anticipated project is spearheaded by creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, the first creation from the pair since their cruelly axed cult Netflix series, The OA.
Dickinson plays Bill, a softly spoken hacker-turned-Banksy type who has a mullet and a penchant for murder mysteries. In Dickinson's deft hands, the role is much less Mr Robot than it sounds. Bill is magnetic, quietly charismatic and sorrowful. And while Corrin is terrific in the leading role of Gen Z amateur investigator Darby Hart, the softness Dickinson teases out of their character makes him the most watchable part of the series.
"We finished filming in Utah, just us two, and we’d got really into it,” he says, “figuring out the dynamic and the characters. It was such a good time, obviously it’s really serious material, but we had a lot of fun, outside of it and during it. It became difficult not to laugh at each other."
So off to LA, is it? Not quite. Dickinson is an East London boy through and through. Born in Leytonstone and raised in the neighbouring Highams Park, the 27-year-old actor reckons he will likely live here in some form forever.
What’s the London dream, then? “I feel like the London dream is just getting to the end of the week and still having the money and energy to do something at the weekend,” he laughs. “Being able to afford more than two pints, or like a one bedroom flat in Hackney that doesn’t cost £1,500 a month.”
Dickinson is working class, his mum a hairdresser, his dad a social worker, and he never attended drama school. Instead, aged 17, he dropped out of college, where he was studying drama, and considered a life in the Marines.
“I was so close,” he recalls, “I spoke to my parents about it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I crave structure, routine and purpose, I knew it would keep me focused. And acting didn’t feel like a real thing. But the Marines felt very tangible, very immediate.” And, one would assume, enticingly consistent in its salary, compared to acting.
Luckily a teacher at RAW, Dickinson’s Waltham Forest-based acting academy, convinced him to stick at it. Within four years he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and Gotham Independent Film Award for his role in Eliza Hittman’s gritty, gay, Brooklyn boyhood drama, Beach Rats.
Dickinson may have been on a roll since the age of 21, but did access come easy? “It didn’t, it didn’t,” he admits, “I was lucky in that I got an agent aged 17 or 18 because of a play that I did, whereas that’s not always the case. It’s all circumstantial, you’ve got to find out where the rooms are and how to get into them.”
And even when young working class actors manage to find those rooms, the “how” is often nepotistic, or financial, with hidden costs like travelling to auditions and headshots around every corner. Many drama schools still charge for students to even audition.
This was also the reason Dickinson was never tempted to apply. “At the time, when I left school, I was working in a hotel, and I was like, ‘There’s no way I want to get into that much debt.’ Maybe I could have paid it off by now, but it’s incredibly frightening when you don’t come from the most economically stable background.”
For students looking to become actors now, Dickinson wishes for free tuition, but in lieu of that he’ll take a scrapping of the audition fee and some fresh eyes inside drama schools. “Those institutions, your LAMDAs, your RADAs, they just feel a little dated in their approach.”
On the one hand, there's dated drama institutions, and on the other, there's an industry threatened by artificial intelligence. Rock. Hard place. This is something which plays a coincidentally key role in A Murder at the End of the World.
Alongside Bill and Darby's dusty Mid Western cold case chase, there is a second timeline, set in a threateningly technologically advanced hotel in Iceland. The hotel is owned by a power-hungry tech billionaire Andy Ronson, played by Clive Owen, who brings a little big-screen weight to the otherwise young or relatively unknown cast.
"I've seen Children of Men like, so many times," Dickinson admits, allowing himself a little space to go all fanboy. "Clive is such a gent, he's so lovely." The real star of the show, though, is Ronson's AI assistant, Ray, whose intentions are unclear.
The irony is not lost on Dickinson that AI is also partially to blame for the timing of our chat, three episodes into this series instead of ahead of its release. That’s a result of the Hollywood actors’ strike, which, as well as pay, was largely focused around implementing safeguarding measures to limit the use of AI in filmmaking, protecting actors’ likenesses and preventing the rise of the deep fakes.
“It’s quite wild that it aligned with that,” Dickinson says. The acceleration of tech has always scared him, but by and large, it’s been a good thing in many fields, he says – even film making.
"I knew that we could build out worlds with computed generated technology, because we can't afford to have like, 1,000 extras, especially in independent films. But the thing of taking someone's likeness and using it, that's alarming and problematic on so many levels.
"On a human level, in the field of art and what it’s doing to creativity is quite worrying,” he says. “The idea of films being written by AI is pretty terrifying.”
The series also bears similarities to Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, released last year, with Edward Norton in the power-hungry tech billionaire role that time around. It was one of many to fall into the “eat the rich” satire category of 2022, with Triangle of Sadness also occupying a space.
How does Dickinson, a working class actor, feel about the saturation of this specific satire? Is it the hard-hitting takedown it once was, or just another way to glamourise the rich even as we "satirise" them?
“It’s definitely an important thing to show,” he offers, then reevaluates. “It bothers me that access [to the industry] is still hard, it bothers me that certain stories around privilege gain such a spotlight. And it seems to me that certain working class stories tend to be quite doom and gloom, so we need to do work in changing narratives.”
As well as A Murder…, Dickinson is also currently promoting The Iron Claw, in which he sports a mullet, something which greatly upsets his mother.
“My mum always has something to say about my hair – when I shave it, when I have it very, very short. She's always like 'You look good with long hair.’ She’s always got something to say, she’s very honest, but that’s mums.”
Luckily, Dickinson’s particularly gnarly – or, as he puts it “pretty devastating” – Iron Claw mullet is a wig, as are most of his cast mates’, save for Jeremy Allen White, who only needed extensions due to his already luscious curls. What couldn’t be simulated, though, was the physique of a wrestler, so Dickinson began a training regime – “It was just a lot of eating a lot of food and lifting heavy things,” he says, matter-of-factly – to gain muscle mass for the film.
Thankfully, Dickinson plays David Von Erich, one of the relatively less-hulking brothers, especially compared to Kerry and Kevin, played by Allen White and Efron. "I enjoyed it because I didn't have to be as ripped as those guys," Dickinson admits, "my character's physique wasn't super, super ripped, so I was like 'I'm just gonna eat lovely food.' They were eating no carbs while I was just eating what I wanted, it was great."
He’d do it again for the right role, he says, to which I ask the inevitable “Bond?” and he calls me out for doing what every journalist has done in the past ten years when presented with a young male British actor for an interview.
“Bond would be sick, I’d definitely entertain Bond, but it also just feels like such a notorious thing that everyone gets asked about if you’re British and male.” But he's selling himself short here, and so am I. Dickinson being popped the Bond question isn't just because he's a British man, but because he's versatile, hugely talented, slightly dangerous, and has already proved the ease with which he could slip into this kind of role back in 2021, in The Kings Man. If he gets it, it would be a worthy win.
Nevertheless, that's the great unknown. So I offer the other big two franchises of the same initials. Batman? “Always loved Batman, but Rob’s got that down,” he counters. Barbie? “Yeah. I’ve got a little bit of Kenergy. I also just really like Alan, I relate to Alan a lot.”
Even without the franchises, Dickinson is getting to be pretty recognisable these days, something he says comes with an interesting side effect.
“You get to hear people’s opinions, good or bad. Some guy came up to me in a supermarket in America and was like, ‘Yeah, hey man, I watched Triangle [of Sadness] and like… yeah… my friend liked it…’” he laughs. “Even if it’s not their cup of tea, people will let you know.”
But Dickinson likes the negative ones. "It’s good, you don’t want to be positive all the time, you don’t need to be told ‘You’re great, you’re great, you’re great’, it gets boring,” he says. Even if strangers aren’t giving him flack, his family will make sure of it. “Anything I do, my older brother’s like ‘You’re not in Hollywood now mate,’ and I’m like ‘Mate – I wasn’t even doing anything!’ But you need it, or you get too big for your boots.”
He’s crossed paths with enough of these people to know to avoid it now, he confides. “Then they cross over into persona, instead of person, it’s very easy to lose touch of real life, real people, real problems. You get wrapped up in cotton wool, get things done for you, and it’s too late. And you're just bad, bad, bad."
Hence his understanding of the struggle to get to the end of the weekend with two pints and rent money to your name. But for all that talk of the American dream, London is still where Dickinson’s heart is. “This is the thing, I love London, for all its problems and its flaws, I’ll always hopefully live here. When I’m away, I miss it.”
So whether it’s Bond, Barbie or Batman on the cards next, this London boy's got no chance of getting too big for his boots.
A Murder at the End of the World is available now on Disney+ with new episodes released weekly.
