Harris Dickinson Plays With Ambiguity in ‘Babygirl’ and Keeps a Secret from Nicole Kidman

Harris Dickinson was nervous about approaching Nicole Kidman.

That wouldn’t necessarily be notable under normal circumstances, but the English actor had already been cast alongside her in the erotic drama “Babygirl,” as the intern who begins an affair with Kidman’s buttoned-up CEO. They had a Zoom with writer-director Halina Reijn, who was enthusiastic about their playful banter and sure Dickinson would hold up. And yet, when he found himself at the same event as Kidman, shyness took over. He admitted this to Margaret Qualley, who took matters into her own hands and presented it.

“She helped me break the ice a little bit,” Dickinson said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

On set, it would be a completely different story. Dickinson may not be as “bold and mischievous” as his character Samuel, but in the making of “Babygirl,” he, Kidman and Reijn had no choice but to fearlessly dive into this exploration of sexual power dynamics, going in an intimate, awkward and exhilarating direction. and memorable places. This made the film, in theaters on Christmas Day, one of the must-sees of the year.

“There was something unsaid that we adhered to,” Dickinson said. “We didn’t know each other’s personal lives. When we were working and we were the characters, we didn’t stray from the material. I never tried to attach the whole Nicole Kidman story. Otherwise it probably would have been a bit of a mess. »

His performance confirms what many in the movie world suspected since his debut seven years ago as a Brooklyn tough questioning his sexuality in Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats”: Dickinson is one of the the most exciting young talents of the moment.

Dickinson, 28, grew up in Leytonstone, east London – the same neck of the woods as Alfred Hitchcock. Cinema was a part of his life, whether it was Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films at the local multiplex or venturing into town to see the more social and realistic films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.

“Workers’ cinema interested me,” he says. “People around me who represented my world.”

Fittingly, his entry into artistic creation began behind the camera, with a comedy web series he made as a child, which he now describes as “really bad parodies” of films and broadcasts of the time. But things really started to click when he started performing in local theater.

“I remember feeling invigorated and accepted,” he said. “I felt for the first time and I felt like I could express myself in a way where I didn’t feel vulnerable and I felt alive and on fire about something.”

When he was around 17, someone suggested he try acting. He didn’t even fully understand it was a career possibility, but he started auditioning. At 20, he was cast in “Beach Rats” and, he says, he just “kept going.” Since then, he’s had a wide range of opportunities in films, big like “The King’s Man,” and small. He is captivated as a male model in Ruben Östlund’s Cannes-winning “Triangle of Sadness,” as an estranged father of a 12-year-old in Charlotte Regan’s “Scrapper,” and as an actor bringing to life to her ex-boyfriend in “The Souvenir” by Joanna Hogg. Part II”, the charismatic and tragic wrestler David Von Erich in “The Iron Claw” by Sean Durkin and a soldier in “The Iron Claw” by Steve McQueen. “Blitz.”

But “Babygirl” would present new challenges and opportunities with a character that is almost impossible to define.

“It was confusing in a really interesting way. There wasn’t a lot of specificity, which I appreciated because it was a bit of a challenge to pinpoint exactly what motivated him and made him tick,” Dickinson said. “There was a directness that revealed a lot to me, like a fearlessness in the way he spoke, or a social unconsciousness in a certain way – like not fully realizing that what he’s saying is affecting someone a certain way. But I didn’t impose too many rules on him.

Part of the film’s appeal is the ever-changing power dynamic between the two characters, which can change during the course of a scene.

As Reijn said: “It’s a warning about what happens when you repress your own desires. She was particularly impressed by Dickinson’s ability to make everything improvised and the fact that he could look like a 12-year-old boy in one shot and a confident 45-year-old man in the next.

Since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, the film has sparked surprisingly direct conversations with audiences spanning generations. But Dickinson understood that this was what Reijn wanted.

“She really wanted to show the ugliness and awkwardness of these things and relationships and sex,” he said. “This kind of goofy version and the performative version of it is much more interesting, at least to me, than the kind of fantasy, romanticized, sexy thing that we’ve seen a lot of.”

Dickinson recently returned behind the camera, directing his first feature film under the banner of his new production company. Set against the backdrop of homelessness in London, “Dream Space” tells the story of a drifter trying to assimilate and understand his cyclical behavior.

The film, which wrapped earlier this year, gave him a better appreciation of how many people go into making a film. He also began to understand that “acting is just being able to relax.”

“When you’re relaxed, you can do things that are truthful,” he said. “That only happens if you’re surrounded by the right people: the director who creates the right environment. The Intimacy Coordinator facilitates a safe space. A colleague of Nicole’s encourages this kind of courage and performance in what she does.

Dickinson finally got to the point where he was able to ask Kidman about his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick and Lars Von Trier. But he also kept a shattering possibility between him and his director.

“There is a world in which Samuel doesn’t even exist. He is only a kind of device or product for his own story. And I like that because it kind of means that you can sometimes take the character into a very unrealistic realm and be almost like a deity in the story,” Dickinson said. “We haven’t talked about it with Nicole.”