Harris Dickinson: 'There are so many injustices. How do you stay across all of them?'

“I’m in rehearsals for this Beatles film. But I’ve got a week off, so…” 

Harris Dickinson is in the middle of an intensive spell at Beatles school when he welcomes Big Issue to his office in East London. The actor is preparing to play John Lennon – alongside Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan – in four Fab Four films from director Sam Mendes showing the story of the biggest band in history from each individual Beatle’s perspective.  

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He’s got blisters on his fingers that tell their own story. Dickinson is playing a lot of guitar. He loves it, though. And off-screen, a band is forming among the lead actors. “We’re trying… We’re trying,” he grins. “We’re doing a lot of music. It’s been an incredibly enriching, challenging and beautiful process trying to understand such an icon.” 

As an actor, Dickinson is the real deal.  

From the Brooklyn teenager exploring his sexuality in 2017 breakthrough Beach Rats to the male model caught in the chaos and projectile puking in Ruben Östlund’s off-kilter, Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness, via a wrestling Von Erich brother alongside The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White and Zac Efron in The Iron Claw, the young dad stepping up in Charlotte Regan’s brilliant social realist debut Scrapper, and as the intern having an intense affair with boss Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, he’s one of those transformative actors. Never the same, in accent, mannerism or character.  

But his latest role, as writer-director of a feature film, is a real step into the unknown. Urchin is a character study of a young man experiencing homelessness told with sensitivity and style. This is not the film we might imagine a young actor midway through cracking Hollywood to make. 

Harris Dickinson welcomes Big Issue with a grin. It’s a cool space. There’s a copy of Patti Smith’s book Just Kids alongside some classic film tomes. A clapperboard from the Urchin set is on another shelf. A framed poster for Steven Spielberg’s ET towers above us, lest we think he’s all serious and not also an entertainer. 

Dickinson is making tea. But the milk keeps curdling and he’s not satisfied. “I can’t give you that. I just can’t. Honestly, this has never happened to me before.”  

Happily, his third attempt produces a fine brew. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. If it was crap, would you just quietly drink it?” Nope, it is actually good.  

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The film is great too. Dickinson captures a sense of community and humour on the street alongside the brutality of the systems people experiencing homelessness can be forced to navigate. 

“You have to care about the actual issue before your pursuit of storytelling comes into it,” says the 29-year-old. “I had a version of this story that didn’t involve homelessness as the starting point – but I became compelled to try to understand more.” 

Before, during and after making Urchin, he volunteered with local homelessness organisations in London. 

“It’s all good sort of peacocking for a cause and fucking tweeting about it. But what are you gonna do? How much do you really care about it? How will you lend a hand?” he says.  “There were people in our society that had fallen between the cracks. And it felt like the most immediate way to try and support vulnerable people.” 

After first volunteering with Project Parker – a ‘safe space’ for rough sleepers set up in Walthamstow during lockdown – he began an ongoing and fruitful partnership with Under One Sky, a volunteer-led charity helping homeless people with food, clothing, shelter and human connection. Its CEO, Mikkel Juel Iversen, was named a Big Issue Changemaker in 2025. “I started with one of their branches in Waterloo for a couple of years, then moved to the Hackney one and we got that going again,” says Dickinson. The time he spends with Under One Sky impacted Urchin in major ways.  

“I was volunteering and simultaneously speaking to people in the community who were previously unhoused, currently sleeping on the streets or had dealt with addiction or displacement,” he says. 

“The core of our film, the character Mike, was heavily scrutinised by people in that world. That gives you license to take it in different directions and use humour.  

“I noticed that when you’re with the community – and I put emphasis on community, because there is such a reliance on each other, they know each other, they fight, they love – there’s always humour. 

“It was important that it wasn’t just this sort of sad lens on suffering. I want to celebrate their humour and intellect – people that have gone to the brink of life experience, whether it’s trauma or homelessness, are often the most vibrant souls. They kind of have to be to cope with the darkness.”  

In the lead role, Frank Dillane gives a brilliantly drawn study of a man struggling with addiction, rejection, self-destructive and self-sabotaging urges, and with a system that excludes him.  

“It felt like the right story to enter into this [filmmaking] world with,” says Dickinson, who cites Agnes Varda, Lynne Ramsay and Filipino filmmaker Lono Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light, “an amazing urban odyssey that embraces magical realism”, as influences.  

“I’m interested in mental health. I’m interested in trauma and in one’s own pursuit of sanctity and sanity and calmness. Mike represents all those desires. I was intrigued by his journey. And it felt representative of what I was witnessing.”  

This comes through on screen, an authentic depiction of the way people experiencing homelessness are moved through the city, through the criminal justice system, through various agencies.  

It shows the short-term, survival instinct that street homelessness can engender – the daily fight for shelter and survival trumping strategic decision-making when the fan is permanently covered in shit.  

“I was reading a lot about trauma and what it can do to the mind. When someone like Mike is confronted with kindness, it can quickly turn to rejection – as a form of self-preservation. That is very common with people that are vulnerable and are hurting.” 

Urchin also highlights how a stable roof over the head is so important when trying to establish a new way of living. After a short spell in prison, Mike is released into temporary accommodation. He also meets the man he assaulted and robbed through the restorative justice scheme – but facing up to his actions sends him reeling. When the stress of looking for a new place to live arises – and he’s told where he fits on the hierarchy of need in the local area – his unsteady equilibrium is further disturbed.  

“I was really destabilised by a form of therapy that was meant to unlock things. It sent me into a bit of a spiral. I think that’s what a lot of that restorative justice section is about,” Dickinson explains. “He is not ready to address certain things. 

“The delicacy of the mind is extraordinary. I didn’t want to blame anyone – there is amazing work done by individuals in extremely under-funded sectors. But it is about the hoops someone has to jump through and having to find a way to carry on when they are confronted with their past continuously, which makes it phenomenally hard.” 

Advising Dickinson and Dillane was the film’s homelessness consultant, Jack W Gregory – a writer, poet and podcaster with extensive lived experience of homelessness and addiction. He was brought in by Joanna Hogg to advise the actors on issues around addiction and homelessness on her Souvenir films – and met Dickinson on the sequel.   

“I’d been involved as a vulnerable person in County Lines when I was an addict and Harris had done the County Lines film, so we were talking, and he told me about the idea for a film he had brewing,” Gregory says, when Big Issue calls him at his home in Norfolk.  “He said he would be in touch, but I didn’t expect to hear from him again. That’s what usually happens in the film industry. Then, at the start of last year, I got a call from him. He kept his promise after all those years. I read the scripts and wanted to make sure the writing got the essence of homelessness. Because it’s not just my voice I’m representing, but every other person out there. 

“Too many productions don’t hire people with lived experience. And you can tell. It doesn’t feel authentic. Sometimes it feels like poverty porn. But Harris had the sense and humanity to want to represent what you’ve lived properly. The prison system is broken. You get released with £46 and a tent. You get lost in the system.” 

In the age of the nepo baby, Harris Dickinson stands out. His father is a social worker, his mum a hairdresser – a combination, it turns out, that offers all the tools an aspiring actor and storyteller could need.  

“I grew up with people in my home getting their haircut and telling stories every day,” says Dickinson.  

“I was intrigued by the real-life drama, and now I’m in pursuit of capturing that. My family are socially minded – my dad’s been close to things within the community and through work that has opened him up to new levels of empathy and understanding. And anger, I guess, towards certain things. That’s been passed down.  

“And I’m inquisitive, always trying to understand both sides. We’re in a super-polarised time. The less room we make for hearing people out on both sides, the more division there will be. I don’t want to speak too politically, because I’m just a fucking actor and filmmaker, I’m nobody, I don’t like telling people what to think or do. But it’s a scary time.” 

Dickinson hustled for years to finance his film. However big a star the driving force behind a film might be, if it deals with homelessness and mental health struggles, it’s unlikely to top many film financiers’ wish lists.  

“We had support from the BBC from day one, but it was our responsibility to find the rest of the finance,” says Dickinson. “We went to Cannes to beg for money from financiers. I did six meetings a day. You have to stick up for your film continuously. And people don’t always want to tell stories that have a social-realistic core and I get it. They want to make money.” 

So is there a political side to your filmmaking? 

“It does have a political backbone. I want it to start conversations and interrogate issues. I think of myself as a political person and try to be well-informed. It’s overwhelming. There are so many injustices. How do you stay across all of them? How do you even begin?” 

For Harris Dickinson, you begin by acting locally. It is complicated to combine being a Hollywood ace face and a street level volunteer support worker. But he persists.  

“It is a strange one – this has always been a private thing I’ve pottered along and done,” he says. 

“But mobilising in your community is a good way – from grassroots work all the way up to pushing for legislative change – changing conversations is the first step.  

“If done correctly, film can also do that. That’s not me saying mine is there to take down the world. I don’t want that to be part of the rhetoric. But there’s potential within film for that to happen.”  

Urchin is in cinemas from 3 October.

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