Harris Dickinson

In Triangle of Sadness (2022) Carl stands shirtless in a casting line while a presenter asks for a scowl for the expensive label and a grin for the cheap one, and Dickinson does both on command with a face that has learned what it is worth. That is Östlund's joke, and it is also a fair description of the actor. He is handsome in the way a model is handsome, and he spends most of his films letting us watch the man behind the face work out what the face is for. In Babygirl (2024) Samuel gives Nicole Kidman's Romy orders, and Dickinson puts a hesitation before each one, as if checking his own nerve. The hesitation is the performance.

He came up through short films, television and the stage before Beach Rats (2017), Eliza Hittman's film about a teenager unsure of what he wants, gave him a lead and a reputation for playing that kind of uncertainty. Since then he has moved between British independents and larger international films: Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness, Charlotte Regan's Scrapper (2023), Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw (2023), Steve McQueen's Blitz (2024) and Halina Reijn's Babygirl the same year. Three of those directors are women, and the films he has made with them are about power, sex and who is looking after whom. That does not look like an accident.

In Scrapper he is bleached and boyish as Jason, a father who has never been in charge of anything and is alarmed to find he would like to be, and he is good at being told off by a twelve-year-old; his kitchen scenes with Lola Campbell are the best in the film. In The Iron Claw he gives David Von Erich the ease of the son who knows he is liked, and the film is strongest when he, Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Stanley Simons are piled into a car or wrestling on a lawn. He is funny without visibly trying, and the funniest thing he does is lose an argument: Carl in the taxi, unable to work out which principle he is defending.

The performance we keep going back to is Babygirl. When Samuel tests his guess about his boss in front of other people, we laughed, and then felt something we were less sure of, and that was Dickinson's doing, because he plays Samuel not as a seducer with a plan but as a young man who does not yet know whether he is right. Not every film knows what to do with him. Blitz gives Jack about three scenes and a look, and a look is not a part. He has said that acting is neurotic, and the roles that suit him are the ones that let the neurosis show.

He has now directed a film, Urchin (2025), which we have not reviewed. An actor whose whole method is the visible second thought has taken a job in which second thoughts cost money. We hope he keeps the other one.