Harris Dickinson and Hollywood’s New Leading Men
After a long drought, the last half-decade has brought a new crop of actors with interesting faces, vulnerability, sensuality, and an anxious bravado that’s been missing in leading men since at least the 1980s. These men, who mostly hail from Ireland and the U.K., are not the new Hugh Grant. (Not even Hugh Grant wants to be Hugh Grant anymore.) Nor are they the new Tom Cruise, who cannot be replicated — no matter how hard Glen Powell tries. They’re undeniably charming heartthrobs, but they also show an emotional complexity that’s exciting to watch unfold across their individual performances and burgeoning careers.
I’m talking about Harris Dickinson, as well as Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, who are the most compelling actors in cinema since Robert De Niro, William Hurt, Julian Sands, and Al Pacino (in his more subtle performances). The reason for this noted excellence in imports must be more than their lack of veneers. Leonardo DiCaprio ushered in an era of the baby-faced star, a mantle taken up by Robert Pattinson, Timothée Chalamet, and a few Disneyfied leading men who, like Austin Butler, were Disney child stars (or look as if they could have been). Those actors generally have hooded eyes and a face that could be described as pretty. This new group is handsome, with expressive eyes and interesting shapes to their noses and mouths. They look like grown men, not grown-up teen idols.
These men also seem more open to leaning into their sensuality, revealing a tenderness and bold willingness to be objectified. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that they are savvy when it comes to choosing roles, with many of their breakouts coming through the lenses of women and gay men directors. They don’t get stuck in rom-coms like Grant or evade their female fans by opting for gritty, action-oriented roles like Ryan Gosling and Tom Hardy. They reject old-school ideas of marketing films to men or women and instead choose sexy romances that complicate sex and love, such as Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, which opens on December 25 across the U.S. The female perspective is inescapable in this pop masterpiece. From the moment the camera follows Kidman’s gaze on Dickinson’s silver chain, belt, and loosening tie at the office Christmas party, it’s clear an affair between this high-functioning CEO and her lanky intern is inevitable.
Kidman won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for this exploration of power dynamics in work and sex. Significantly, that award was given by a jury led by Isabelle Huppert, star of perverse masterpieces like The Piano Teacher and Elle, who called Kidman’s performance “bold.” But what made Babygirl stand out from previous films like those starring Huppert, or a more apt comparison to the 2002 film Secretary, is 28-year-old Dickinson’s talent. He is smart enough to play dumb, aware enough to be sensitive, and capable of delivering his best performances while supporting others. All of these qualities can be seen in his turn in Charlotte Regan’s recent Scrapper, as well as more widely seen films like Triangle of Sadness and The Iron Claw.
In Babygirl, Dickinson plays a scarily intuitive intern named Samuel. There is the instant shock when Samuel insubordinately tells his boss Romy (Kidman) that she likes to be told what to do. He’s not just out of line; he’s right. Samuel pushes this further when he calls Romy a good girl after ordering her a glass of milk at a bar. These scenes underline the importance of humor in sex, which few actors since James Spader have explored so well. With less commitment from the two leads, these moments might have been awkward instead of shockingly sexy. Dickinson giggles a little when first ordering Kidman around, figuring out the calibration of performance in his new role as dom. His character also laughs a little when learning of her preferred safe word, in what the Brits might call a subtle piss-take.
We can thank both the sharp comic instincts of Dickinson and the precise direction by Reijn, who stated in a Q&A in Los Angeles that between some takes of the edgy sex scenes, she directed the actors to laugh. Crucially, this helped them loosen up and kept those scenes truer and sexier, differentiating Babygirl from the self-serious erotic thrillers that inspired it. As in her previous film Bodies Bodies Bodies, Reijn plays with genre but avoids cliché. While exploring domination and masochism, Samuel is never called a 50 Shades “master” or even “Daddy.” The closest we get to that is in one scene where Dickinson dances shirtless to George Michael’s “Father Figure.” Inherently goofy yet sexy, Dickinson commits to both aspects, and it works. Similar was his unforgettable character-introduction scene in Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime and many of his key befuddled-male-model moments in Triangle of Sadness.
Dickinson lets the camera objectify him, and so does Paul Mescal, currently baring thighs and a massive torso in Gladiator II. In his breakout role, the series adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Mescal was so perfectly cast as the secretly sensitive jock Connell that he is still something like the character in popular imagination, whether he’s wearing three-inch inseam shorts in public or bro-ing out with his fellow gladiators in ancient Rome as if he’s joking with the boys at the pub.
Often playing someone who seems on the verge of tears even when, or especially when, partying hard, Mescal can seem tipsy off his own sensitivity. He embodies characters without fully losing himself, a trait popularized by great Hollywood stars before him like Cary Grant or Joan Crawford. But the 28-year-old is equally adept at supporting others, as he did in his Oscar-nominated role in Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, playing the sad dad to then-11-year-old Frankie Corio. Knowing the camera wouldn’t solely be focused on Mescal in that film, Wells depended on him to be excellent in the margins. “Paul was paying attention and could get excited about the filmmaking process as a whole, not just his own performance, and that’s part of what made him such a fulfilling collaborator,” she told me.
Like Mescal, Josh O’Connor found popularity thanks to a TV show, playing an unfairly charismatic Prince Charles on The Crown. But in his greatest role so far, in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, he performs primarily in Italian. He plays Arthur, a dirty Englishman looking for Etruscan relics and love, simultaneously projecting a cocky churlishness and a resistance to his own vulnerability, always on the verge of letting tenderness emerge. In a tone as enigmatic and beautiful as her films, Rohrwacher commented, “We often imagine that revolutions are violent; Josh showed me how much revolutionary strength there is in care and hospitality.”
Polarities — mystery and accessibility, bravado and goofiness — emerge through O’Connor, sometimes all in one role, whether that’s in La Chimera, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, The Crown, or Franci Lee’s God’s Own Country. In Autumn de Wilde’s Emma., O’Connor based much of his performance on a grin. To play the charismatic tennis rogue Patrick Zweig in Challengers, he curls the grin into a smirk. “I remember having a breakthrough where I was convinced he needed to smile,” O’Connor told British GQ. “Anytime he’s angry, I’d just whack in a little smile.”
That chummy charm, paired with a deep, unreachable mystery, defines O’Connor’s performances, but when it comes to a more natural mastery of comic timing, Dickinson triumphs. And unlike Mescal, Dickinson often disappears into his roles. These gifts are what make his potential career trajectory especially intriguing. He has the talent of a young Gosling, but with more varied genre choices, and is also better at playing the himbo than Gosling; he is less self-conscious and has a drier sense of humor. Comparisons have been drawn between Dickinson and Drew Starkey, who plays Daniel Craig’s object of desire in Guadagnino’s Queer. When the camera is on Starkey, though, he retains the opaque appearance of someone who is used to being looked at. Dickinson never has that glazed passivity; he is always gazing out, taking in, giving back the unexpected.
The majority of Dickinson’s notable work has been outside of his home country. Unlike many of his peers, he did not attend a posh drama school — a rarity for British film actors — and produces some of the strongest accent work on-screen for a Brit, whether he’s turning out a Brooklyn lilt in Beach Rats or a Texan twang in The Iron Claw. A career built on playing Americans is especially ironic for a man with a Kes tattoo. (The tattoo, inspired by Ken Loach’s 1969 film of the same name, can be seen in Babygirl and a recent A24 conversation with Andrew Garfield. Loach’s film is a landmark of British cinema, particularly in terms of its representation of the Northern working class; in the discussion with Garfield, Dickinson mentions that his dad is from Northern England, too.) But American director Eliza Hittman, who cast Dickinson off a self-tape for his first film, the Brooklyn-set Beach Rats, told me she was taken by his ability to be “adept at code-switching” from the moment she met the young actor. Raised in a London suburb, Dickinson “grew up surrounded by kids from different economic backgrounds,” she wrote to me. Aside from his comedic chops, nuanced line readings, and sometimes serpentine physique, what I find most fascinating about Dickinson so far is a tenacious inner spark. It’s almost as if he has something to prove. Exactly what, I’m not sure, but after coming up in a flawed British film world dominated by class, who could blame him?
Dickinson is currently working on his own directorial debut, which will reveal more about his cinematic goals. Until then, we have Samuel in Babygirl, who tenderly tells his boss that sometimes he scares himself. Samuel doesn’t mean that he’s a villain, as his character would be in traditional erotic thrillers, but rather, that he doesn’t totally understand his own deep intuition. In another key scene in Babygirl, Dickinson confronts his boss-lover’s husband by telling him, bluntly, that he has an outdated view of sexuality. Reijin underlines the meaning of this scene by making Kidman’s husband a male director (of theater). The dude doesn’t get it. But Reijin does, and she knows Dickinson is a new model. He absorbs all the energy Kidman gives off and laser-points it back at her. In this updated erotic thriller, the only villain is Romy’s misdirected masochism, possibly aimed at blowing up her own life instead of being contained in sexual games, as Samuel points out. In a year of great supporting roles, Dickinson’s in Babygirl is the most essential.
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