With Urchin, Harris Dickinson Goes From Leading Man to Storyteller
The Babygirl star makes his feature directorial debut with a deeply personal film about life on London’s edges.

It would’ve been easy for Harris Dickinson to rest on his laurels. Since breaking out in 2017’s gritty indie drama Beach Rats, the London native has established himself as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after young actors, landing roles that challenge and charm.
He’s mastered projecting a rugged vulnerability with roles in Sean Durkin’s wrestling tragedy The Iron Claw, Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness, and, of course, Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller Babygirl, opposite Nicole Kidman. Soon, he’ll play John Lennon in Sam Mendes’s quartet of Beatles biopics, alongside a who’s-who cast of British and Irish stars, including Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan, Joseph Quinn, and Barry Keoghan. At 29, it’s not a bad place to be.
But Dickinson’s latest project, Urchin, marks a stark departure from the leading-man trajectory. He wrote and directed the film, in which he plays an unsettling side character, Nathan, the deceitful friend of protagonist Mike, played with painful earnestness by Frank Dillane. (Despite being the biggest name in the film, Dickinson’s appearance is incidental; he only stepped in after the actor meant for the role had to drop out.) Dillane’s Mike is a troubled young man living on the streets of London, caught in a cycle of poverty he can’t escape. The film marks Dickinson’s feature directorial debut, but he’s been writing it for five years (and dreaming of it for even longer). And the material isn’t just heavy, it’s personal.
Frank Dillane as Mike in Urchin
“I’d noticed cyclical behavior in people around me growing up,” Dickinson tells W ahead of the film’s release. “I wanted to tell a story about someone going through something precarious in London, in a system that is tricky to navigate, and in a world we don’t always get insights into. It’s always been an issue that’s close to my heart.”
Dickinson now lives in London with his longtime girlfriend, the pop singer Rose Gray, but he grew up with what he’s described as humble beginnings in Highams Park. Urchin draws on his memories and experiences to create a film about living on society’s margins.
“This film is an amalgamation of stories and people that I know, things I’ve grown up with and heard along the way,” he says. “A lot of situations are based on things that have happened as well.”
The first time Dickinson appears on-screen as Nathan, he’s wearing disheveled clothing and sporting a broken nose as he asks passersby for spare change. When Mike approaches him and accuses him of stealing his wallet, the two get into a scuffle that sets off a chaotic chain of events, eventually landing Mike in prison. Urchin highlights how, despite their best efforts, an individual with little support is no match for a system that churns people out and spits them onto the streets.
Dickinson as Nathan in Urchin
To prepare for the film—for which Dickinson secured the last bit of funding while filming Babygirl—he and Dillane visited prisons and consulted experts on homelessness and poverty (including his father, a social worker). “We’re not making a documentary, but I wanted to make sure every aspect of the script was challenged and interrogated,” he says.
That realism extended to the casting process; while Dillane is a trained theater actor, many of the other roles were played by first-timers whom Dickinson himself found on the street. “I’d go up to them in the pub, find them outside a station,” he says of the process. “I gathered this list of people I loved in terms of faces or vibes or feelings.”
Eventually, he landed on the “eclectic bunch” of characters orbiting Mike’s life. And while he and casting director Shaheen Baig also worked with theater company Cardboard Citizen (made up of actors with lived experience with homelessness and domestic abuse), Dickinson made a point not to make the process feel exploitative. “I didn’t feel good about taking anyone who was in a really difficult scenario, whether they were unhoused or going through something, and putting them in front of the camera,” he says. “I think that’s tricky and morally tough to do. You’ve got to really make sure the after care is there.”
A scene from Urchin
A self-taught student of cinema, Dickinson hosted low-key weekly screenings for the Urchin cast and crew. They watched films like Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light, Leos Carax’s Lovers on the Bridge, and a series of documentaries by British filmmaker Marc Isaacs. “I wanted to make films before acting really took hold of me,” Dickinson explains. In his early twenties, he made a short film with the BBC and worked as an assistant camera operator and runner on various sets. Despite being “terrified” now to release such a personal project, being back behind the camera felt right.
“It was a gamble,” he says. “It sounds overly prophetic and divine, but I don’t think I would’ve been able to do anything else. It took over my psyche, in a way.”
In May, Urchin premiered at Cannes, where it earned the FIPRESCI prize for Dickinson and the Un Certain Regard Best Actor award for Dillane. To the premiere, Dickinson wore a Prada suit, but was later photographed wearing a pointed t-shirt referencing a quote by former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman that read: “Living on the streets is not a lifestyle choice Suella. It’s a sign of failed government policy.”
As he now immerses himself in the life of perhaps the most famously outspoken Beatle, Dickinson reflects on the artist’s role in a society in turmoil.
“Speaking about [Lennon’s] journey with social issues, it was a thing for the whole band. A lot of people at that time had to suppress it, until it got so radical that he rebelled against it and started to speak about Vietnam, and civil rights,” Dickinson says. “Now we’re in a time where it’s not radical to talk about these things. It just feels like a given. It’s not bravery to support something that’s right or wrong. It feels morally weird to not talk about shit.”
“It’s tricky because, from the outside, people go, ‘Who are you to be talking about it? You’re in the entertainment industry,’” he adds. “But if I was me, just working down the road, I would still talk about these things. It just so happens that people write about them when I say them.”