“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. 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. This week, he talks to Big Issue.
What else is in this week’s Big Issue?
Six months on, we revisit the donkeys serving as animal ambulances in Gaza
Like all Gazans, Dr Saif Alden does not have enough to eat – yet he shares what little he has with his beloved donkeys. “Food is very, very, very, limited. It is not allowed into Gaza,” he tells Big Issue via video call. “We are starving. But we share, because we need them.” The veterinary surgeon is speaking to Big Issue from the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s brutal military offensive – triggered by Hamas attacks in October 2023 – has entered its 23rd month.
