There’s a certain fan interaction that has been stuck in Harris Dickinson‘s mind.

To be sure, Dickinson has been having more of these encounters recently, with his seductive role in Babygirl opening the door to a very specific type of attention. Women — often older women — approach the 28-year-old actor to offer explicit rundowns of their sexual desires. Dickinson is too embarrassed to repeat most of these but says many involve his now- signature utterance from the movie: “Good girl.”

But this morning Dickinson is thinking about an interaction that happened before Babygirl‘s release, at an L.A. grocery store at least a year ago. A fan approached him and asked, “Are you in that model movie?” — a reference to 2022’s Triangle of Sadness, in which Dickinson plays a male model on a doomed luxury yacht cruise. Dickinson readied himself for the kind of praise that usually follows such questions. “What the fuck was up with that?” demanded the man, who proceeded to aggressively pick apart the movie and Dickinson’s acting abilities. “It was like, ‘Oh you think you’re famous, that people care about you? Well I don’t,’ ” Dickinson recalls. “I almost like it when that happens because I get such a constant slew of ‘You’re amazing’ that it can be really interesting when someone is just like, ‘That was shit.’ ”

Triangle of Sadness was decidedly not shit (it was Oscar-nominated), but that’s beside Dickinson’s point. It’s dawning on him that broader fame is coming for him, and he’s not sure he’s ready for it.

When we first meet in December in New York, he’s at the tail end of a truncated, whirlwind press tour for Babygirl, an erotic thriller about an affair between a tech CEO (Nicole Kidman) and her much younger intern (Dickinson) that threatens her perfectly built business and family. At Dickinson’s hotel first thing in the morning, he ambles downstairs balancing a backpack, a tote bag and a large winter coat, with a jet lag that the in-room Nespresso has barely put a dent in. “The night before this, I had a really bad shoulder, and I’m quite dramatic sometimes, so I thought I had a torn ligament,” he says. “I was like, ‘I need to go to the doctor!’ And then I woke up today and I’m like, ‘OK, it’s fine.’ “

He delivers these anecdotes in high spirits, with a grin and a twinkle in his eye. “Oh, how am I going to get through today?” he pleads at one point, citing the THR photo shoot and a Late Night With Seth Meyers taping that still loom. “I guess I’ll just be a big, strong boy.” He vacillates between introspective and goofy — you can see his appetite for taking himself too seriously evaporating in real time. During breakfast, he shows off a napkin-folding trick he learned a few years ago when he was still working in a hotel, doing room service, kitchen shifts and setting up for weddings. “It was a really shit hotel,” he says with a laugh while using his teeth to put the final touches on a fan shape. “I know this looks kind of tacky, but I think sometimes tacky is nice.”

His role in Babygirl puts his disposition — and his very specific position on the boy-to-man spectrum — to good use. Though director Halina Reijn didn’t write the role for Dickinson specifically, she says the movie wouldn’t have worked without him. Kidman signed on to the project in 2022, and instead of being happy about it, Reijn woke up the next morning with a panic attack. “I thought, ‘How are we ever going to find someone who can be her equal, much less dominate her?’ ” she says. That same week, a friend persuaded the director to attend a screening of Triangle of Sadness (an emetophobe, she was wary of the movie’s extended seasickness scene) and as soon as she saw Dickinson onscreen, she knew. “Then I went home and watched Beach Rats that same night and was like, ‘This is exactly what I need,’ ” she says. “The boy and the man in one. The father and the child in one person. Even his height, because I needed someone who could handle her physically.”

Reijn then set up a Zoom to offer him the role (“It seemed to me like he sat in a closet,” she recalls with a laugh), but he needed some time to think. Dickinson says he was unsure how to play the role. The script sees Samuel, an intern at Kidman’s robotics company, as someone both authoritative and vulnerable, who is grappling with his masculinity in real time. On paper, a lot of what he does (propositioning his boss during a meeting, sending her a glass of milk during a company party as a dare) is inappropriate, but he isn’t meant to be lecherous, and that delicate balance felt daunting. Ultimately, the opportunity to do something so high caliber won out, though he never completely rid himself of his shyness.

“Harris has talked before about being shy or unsure of how to play the character, but I never felt that once as we made this project,” notes Kidman by email, adding, “Harris is a brilliant actor — I can’t imagine doing this project with anyone else. I know he’s going to be a massive star.” (Kidman was nominated for a Golden Globe for her Babygirl performance, but despite considerable buzz, the film was shut out of the 2025 Oscar nominations.)

Dickinson maintains the shoot was far more anxiety-ridden for him than it probably seemed to his co-stars — only made worse by his environs. The production required him to move to New York for four months, and the city weighed on him. He lived in the East Village, right on Houston Street, and though he took constant advantage of the proximity to Katz’s Deli (and its world-famous Reuben), he couldn’t handle the neighborhood’s frenetic energy. “People were accidentally ringing my buzzer at night, and I was in a constant state of stress,” he says. “My cortisol was so high that I felt like I was going to explode.”

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Dickinson’s working-class upbringing in East London is a huge influence for the way he moves through the world and Hollywood. He was born in 1996 and grew up in an environment that could be both bucolic (he’s big on hearing birds in the morning) and chaotic (he is the youngest of four siblings). His parents divorced when he was in elementary school, and his mother raised them all while cutting hair in the family kitchen to pay the bills.

“My daily routine was coming downstairs and immediately being confronted by an elderly lady,” he says of his mother’s clients. “They’d all known me my whole life, so I’d just roll down in my [underwear] and be like, ‘You all right, Susan?’ and then squeeze around them as I made my cereal.”

His father, a social worker, moved away and would often stay at a campsite when he came back to visit. “I’d be like, ‘OK, I’m going to see my dad at his tent,’ ” he says with an embarrassed roll of the eyes. “But now, as I get older, I’m like, ‘You’re fucking cool, man.’ ” Dickinson still lives in the same suburb, now in his own house (in an admittedly nicer neighborhood) with his longtime partner, indie-pop musician Rose Gray, and their cat, Misty. Dickinson met Gray during school, and though she doesn’t typically attend his public events, Dickinson has directed a few of her music videos. Even though he doesn’t want the slew of children his mother raised — he says just one, likely, will do, though he’s hesitant to say that “in case I have four kids and then they read this and say, “Oh, you only wanted one?” — he feels comforted by re-creating many of the vibes of his childhood. “My life is sort of half-and-half — I’m doing this very public-facing stuff where I get picked up by drivers and treated very nicely, and then there’s this other part of my life where I’m getting on the Tube in East London and someone spits on my shoe whilst eating a burger.”

He started acting almost accidentally. He loved pop culture from a young age — he went through a phase of idolizing early Justin Bieber and used to lie on his bed listening to everything from James Blunt to Nirvana and pretending he was in a music video — but he didn’t think about acting until his mother put him in a public performing arts program as a way to keep him occupied. He entertained joining the Royal Marines before deciding to try the thing he was learning he loved.

He spent a few fruitless years after high school auditioning for anything he could find, occasionally making it to the final round, only to lose out (he read for the role in Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk that eventually went to Joe Alwyn). A yes eventually came in, and at 21 he went to New York to film Beach Rats, a small indie film about a teenager exploring his sexuality in a decidedly not-gay-friendly community in Coney Island. Dickinson played the lead, Frankie — adopting a Brooklyn accent and, partway through the film, a buzz cut. At the time, he entertained absolutely zero notions about what the movie might become. He says he was so out of the loop about what mattered in Hollywood that even when the film was accepted to the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and even when it won awards in Park City, he didn’t glean the magnitude. He didn’t have a publicist, so requests for things came through his agent and manager, and he said yes somewhat indiscriminately. W Magazine included him in their 2018 Great Performances portfolio, and when he realized he was featured alongside Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone and future co-star Nicole Kidman, “I was like, ‘Fuck, this is crazy, I’m getting asked to do this mad shit.’ ” His team called to tell him he’d been nominated for the Gothams and the Spirit Awards, and he asked whether they thought he might be invited to go. “They were like, ‘Of course you’ll be able to, you’re nominated for best leading actor, you idiot,’ ” he recalls with a laugh.

For the next few years, jobs came steadily, if not quite as loudly. He joined the ensemble cast (Amandla Stenberg, Mandy Moore, Bradley Whitford) of the YA sci-fi film The Darkest Minds, which bombed but allowed him to meet actor Patrick Gibson (The OA, Dexter: Original Sin), who became one of his best friends and later starred in Dickinson’s first short film, 2003 (the experience gave Dickinson the directing itch, and he’s working on his feature debut about a young drifter in London). He played John Paul Getty III in Danny Boyle’s miniseries Trust, which introduced him to veganism (the role called for him to get and stay quite thin, and he kept up the diet for three years before giving it up) and panic attacks (the hours and the stress of playing a kidnapped kid grated). He took roles in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and The King’s Men for the chance to work alongside talent like Angelina Jolie and Ralph Fiennes.

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.”

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.)

His turn in Triangle catapulted him into the rarefied set of young actors who can claim the mantle of “offer only” — meaning they don’t need to audition for roles. When Brit Marling was packaging A Murder at the End of the World, her long-anticipated follow-up to The OA, she needed someone for the lead — a former anarchist hacker turned successful artist — with enough charm to convince the audience to care deeply about his episode-one death. After seeing Dickinson in Beach Rats, then learning he was a Brit pulling off that role, she offered him the job.

When actors don’t audition, it puts more pressure on the first days on set; filmmakers don’t know exactly what to expect. When rehearsals began on A Murder at the End of the World, Marling put Dickinson and co-star Emma Corrin — meeting for the first time — in an El Camino, rehearsing a scene that called for them to sing Annie Lennox’s “No More ‘I Love You’s.’ ” “He has this trick, where he starts a scene like that with just the right degree of making fun of it at first, in this tongue-in-cheek way, and then he really leans into it with feelings,” says Marling. “Then because he’s so sincere, it allowed Emma to be sincere, and the audience can feel it wholeheartedly.”

Reijn describes a similar alchemy on the Babygirl set. You may have heard about Dickinson’s shirtless dance to George Michael’s “Father Figure” — the director envisioned the scene with that exact song before she wrote a single word of the script, making it all the more pivotal. “He’s such a good mover and he’s very masculine, but what I love about it is that you can see he’s also a little bit uncomfortable,” she says. “It makes it that much more human.”

For those wondering, the tattoos Dickinson exposes in that scene are his own — he didn’t think it would be a thing, but then people started asking about everything emblazoned on his abs and arms. He’s too embarrassed to get into them, he says, but explains that the “SKR” emblazoned on his forearm is just the phonetic “skirrr” — he delivers it with a roll of the tongue and a wave of his hand — which he chose for no reason other than silliness.

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Dickinson is rumored to have landed the extremely high-profile John Lennon role in Sam Mendes’ series of Beatles biopics. The director has a four-film deal with Sony to tell the story of the band leading up to their 1970s breakup, with one movie dedicated to each member. If the casting reports hold true, Dickinson will play Lennon alongside Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

It’s a career-defining opportunity and Dickinson is already a little uneasy about the attention the project is garnering. At one point during our time in New York, I ask him, “Are you going to —” and he lets out an immediate groan. “Don’t ask me about that,” he pleads, before I can finish. (I was actually asking about Hot Ones, not the Beatles project.) But a few weeks later, he Zooms me from his kitchen while eating leftover ragù and he offers a more dutiful response: “OK, my comment is that I think it would be a brilliant opportunity to play John Lennon, and to work with Sam and everyone else mentioned. Yeah, I don’t know. It would be splendid.”

Jeremy Allen White, who starred with Dickinson in 2023’s The Iron Claw and is filming the Bruce Springsteen biopic, knows exactly what he’s about to be going through. Last summer, White was in London to see Springsteen play Wembley Stadium as part of his research and had lunch with Dickinson the day after the concert. “I was expressing how much anxiety I was having, and there are probably 12 people in the world that I could have looked to in that moment to talk about how horrifying it was,” White says of the pressure of portraying a rock icon. “I was so grateful for him, and if this movie comes together and he’s able to play John Lennon, I hope I can listen to him if he feels similar — which I’m sure he will because if you’re confident going into something like that, you’re probably a little crazy.”

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.”

One thing he can’t put a stop to is the constant flow of praise — especially after all that shirtless, slow-motion gyrating — so he’s working through that, too. “It’s weird, because I do have vanity like everyone else, but I’m not at ease with the emphasis being on that,” he says. “I don’t want to get that mixed up with my self-worth. But there are worse things to be said to you than, ‘You’re hot,’ you know? It’s flattering. It’s strange.

“I do think I’ll probably look back on all this and be really grateful for the attention,” he concedes. “I’ll put all the comments in a little book, and then when I’m 60 and fat, I’ll read it all to reaffirm to myself that once upon a time people said nice things about me.”

This story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.