Harris Dickinson and the new actor Beatles

Fifteen years ago there were four actors from the UK and Ireland who happened to have once lived together and seemed to be in all the movies, taking over pop culture: Jamie Dornan, Andrew Garfield, Robert Pattinson, and Eddie Redmayne. All of them continue to have big careers. 

Just before them it was Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Tom Hiddleston, James McAvoy. And before them Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Ewan McGregor, Jude Law. Somewhere in there and in between, also Colin Farrell. 

Now a new class is rising and they’ve all reportedly been cast by Sam Mendes in his Beatles project – four separate films about all four members: Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. The timing could not be better. All of them, over the last three to five years or so, have been breaking through, starring in hit television series, blockbuster movies, and/or prestige films. All of them are extremely internet popular. Most of them have been good for gossip where their romances are concerned… 

With the exception, for now, of Harris Dickinson who has been with his partner, musician Rose Gray, for years and since both of them are 28 years old and started dating when they were in school, basically they’re college sweethearts. This comes up in Harris’s new cover story in The Hollywood Reporter, his first major celebrity profile. 

Reading the piece, I had a similar reaction to when I read Paul Mescal’s most recent GQ cover story. That’s not to say that their respective approaches to fame are the same – in fact, Paul seems to be more comfortable than Harris which might be a curious parallel to their respective Beatles – but that neither one appears to be fighting it… or fronting that they don’t want it. And getting too precious about the art of it all. 

Harris, in particular, with his working class background, makes a point in THR about acting that we’re not hearing from, say, Jacob Elordi: sometimes actors take jobs because it’s a JOB. Per THR on his earlier roles: 

“He also took those jobs, quite frankly, to work. Dickinson is candid about the fact that his working-class background afforded him no financial safety net. “I never had any grand expectations of a certain caliber of a career, and I’d gone from working in a hotel to getting work as an actor, so I was just taking the jobs without thinking about what kind of career I had,” he says. “And that is very normal for most actors.” A few years ago, he was on an indie film, talking about simultaneously working on a big-budget commercial film. “This actor on that art house film was like, ‘You have to only do things you love, blah, blah, blah, don’t jeopardize your creative integrity, blah, blah, blah,’ but it doesn’t work like that, especially when you’re a young actor,” he says. “I had taste, but I couldn’t be strict about things because I needed momentum.”

Yes, exactly. Momentum. You know what momentum is? The Kissing Booth. For all that Jacob Elordi dumps on The Kissing Booth, it gave him momentum, at minimum it’s having something on your IMDb page, and on a practical level with Hollywood, it’s what your team can build on – and in Jacob’s case, they did. Look, my client has already been the male lead in a hit Netflix movie, we’re ready for the next level. He’s just a dumbass who wants to downplay that part of the strategy. 

Harris Dickinson is still fresh enough into his ascent that even though he can be more “strict” about his taste and choosier about what he wants to commit to that the pretension hasn’t set in. Yet. Maybe it won’t ever. He seems to be actively guarding himself against pretension: 

“Today, he can be creatively picky but still doesn’t feel like he can pick jobs without taking money into account. He pays close attention to his lifestyle, careful not to get wrapped up in the fancy cars and vacations for fear of feeling like he can’t keep up. “I’m scared of buying stuff — I feel guilty,” he says. When he was 22 and the paycheck for Beach Rats came in, he bought the small house he still lives in. “It was modest, but it became my focus and this very grounding thing for me,” he says. “It was like, OK, I have to look after this and I have to fix stuff when it breaks, I have to sort the garden out. I still try to keep things simple.” (When pressed, he does admit to entertaining the idea of buying a motorbike, but his friends and family so far have talked him out of it.)”

One day soon, probably, Harris Dickinson won’t have to worry about the money. Right now, though, it’s not like he has a Marvel deal. Most of his work is on a smaller scale. Babygirl, Triangle of Sadness, The Iron Claw… these are not big budget films. But those will come. If you’ve seen Babygirl, and if you know the reaction that we’ve all had to him in Babygirl, you know that movie stardom is in Harris’s future. He wants it and he’s also afraid of it. 

“Dickinson says he has safeguards in place to mitigate the potentially corroding nature of stardom. His team is purposefully small — one agent, one manager, one publicist — and their directive is to respect his preferred (slow) pace. On set, he tells staffers not to do the usual waiting on hand and foot. “I can open my own doors, and if I want a drink, I’ll go get my own drink,” he says. “You start to notice your own prissiness, and I don’t like that.”

It'll be interesting to check back in on this in five years. Harris Dickinson isn’t nuclear yet but once those Beatles movies come out (I mean he’s playing John Lennon, ffs, arguably the biggest heatscore) everything will go next level. 

Click here for more on Harris in THR. 

Also attached – Harris and Joseph Quinn out for dinner in London the other night.