- By
- Jonathan Shia
- Photography by
- Paolo Zerbini
Styling by Chiara Spennato. Grooming by Daniele Falzone at Atomo Management using Kevin Murphy. Photographer’s assistant: Sandra Furtschegger. Production by Elena Cimarosti at Atomo Management.
HARRIS DICKINSON DIVES INTO THE ONE PERCENT ON 'TRUST'
The very rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, are different from you and me. “They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them,” he continued, “makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” This observation was never truer than in the case of J. Paul Getty, raised as the heir to an oil fortune he multiplied thousands of times over who became known as the richest man in the history of the world—but one who famously had a payphone installed at his estate for guests and refused to pay the ransom when his grandson John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in Rome in 1973, suspecting the teenager of orchestrating the plot himself. “It’s such a messed-up story about what comes with money and power and conglomerates and oil,” says Harris Dickinson, who plays the younger Getty in the first season of the highly anticipated anthology series Trust, premiering on FX next week. “There’s a lot of loneliness, a lot of sadness, a lot of obscurity, a lot of desperation in that kind of lifestyle and that kind of family.”
Getty’s kidnapping was recounted on the big screen just last December in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World —with rising star Charlie Plummer as the young victim and Christopher Plummer (no relation) stepping in at the last minute to replace Kevin Spacey as his grandfather—but Dickinson is confident that there is still much of the story left untold. With Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire’s Danny Boyle in the director’s chair, Trust promises to spend ten hours luxuriating in a twisting and convoluted true tale that is stranger than fiction. “I was intrigued by the whole family setup and their history and their story, so obviously that was a huge selling point for me, being able to be a part of something where you’re constantly interested and intrigued through your process,” Dickinson recalls. “I was continually trying to find out more about them and more about my character. There were so many different levels to him.”
To prepare for the part, the 21-year-old British actor thoroughly researched the period, belying the “romanticized idea from film and TV and pop culture” he had of the Seventies, and spent time trying to delve into the mind of his real-life counterpart. “It sounds a bit psycho, but I had images up on my wall of the real John Paul Getty III for months and months,” he laughs. “I’d wake up at nighttime and I’d wake up in the morning and just look at them.”
For Dickinson, a newcomer who burst into the spotlight with the release of his début film, Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats, last year, Trust is a first in many ways, most notably the depth of his role and the length of the production. “I’d never been on something for more than two months or so,” he says. He spent all of last summer and much of the fall shooting in and around Rome, retracing Getty’s steps across the piazzas of the Eternal City. “To be with a character for six months was beautiful because you do get to really go on a lovely journey with them—or not lovely in my character’s case,” he explains. “You’re constantly learning more about them. It gives you a good opportunity as an actor to really play and feel confident in your choices as an actor, which is always nice, because you’re swimming in a sea of insecurity most of the time.”
Insecure is not a word that would seem to describe Dickinson, who was one of the most celebrated breakouts of 2017 for his fearless performance as Frankie, a sexually confused and emotionally tortured teenager in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in Beach Rats. He knew he wanted to be an actor from an early age growing up in London, landing in a youth theater school after “looking for some kind of purpose as a ten-year-old,” he says. “I loved it and had a passion for it and it helped me gain confidence and feel like I was expressing myself.”
He left school at seventeen because of the difficulty of balancing auditions with his classes, as well as what he perceived as a lack of dedication among his classmates. “I was in a class full of people who didn’t care about it as much as me, so I was a bit disappointed,” he says. As with so many aspiring actors before him, he ended up working as a bartender for a while between roles.
Then came Beach Rats, offering Dickinson a nuanced, layered, and complicated character that asked more of him than any project ever had before. Over the course of a hot New York summer, Frankie struggles to deal with his own unsettled identity, toggling between a tentative relationship with a girl and hookups with older men he meets on the internet. “I don’t know what I like,” he says early on, and that ambiguity is exactly what makes the film, and Dickinson’s performance, so powerful and affecting. “I don’t think I ever fully did understand him and I think that played a big part in the storytelling,” he says. “So much of him was this huge inability to one, comprehend what was going on in his own head and two, articulate that. I think that inarticulacy is prevalent in a lot of teenagers and even in myself as a man. I don’t know whether it’s a generalization, but from my own experience and from my own observations, in certain men and certainly in a traditional, hyper-masculine environment, to express your sexuality and your identity is I think a little bit more restricted.”
Dickinson’s portrayal, from the ease with which he embodies the swagger of an American teenager down to his drawn-out outer borough accent, is especially impressive considering he came on board the project having spent a total of one day in New York beforehand. He spent a month before filming getting to know the Brooklyn milieu of the film and trying to assimilate. “I was mostly left to my own devices to get a feel for it,” he explains. “I had a little bit of isolation, which helped me get into my character.”
He says he connected with Frankie as soon as he read the audition script, even as he admits to being “just a random British kid.” “I felt the vibe of it straight away and I felt what Eliza was trying to say and the way she was trying to tell the story,” he recalls. “The character had such a deep, boiling toxicity to him that it was going to be interesting to portray. Obviously it was a character very far away from myself in an area that I’d never been to, so it was a challenge, which is always good.” He was nominated in the Best Male Lead category at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards alongside James Franco, Robert Pattinson, and fellow up-and-comers Timothée Chalamet (the eventual winner) and Daniel Kaluuya.
For Dickinson, 2017 was a nonstop year, following up Sundance shooting the big-budget young-adult adaptation The Darkest Minds, due out in August, opposite Amandla Stenberg and Mandy Moore in Atlanta. Then it was off to Rome for the summer for Trust, with a day off in Yorkshire shooting a Burberry trench coat campaign with Alasdair McLellan. “I didn’t think I’d ever do that, it was a nice surprise,” he laughs. “It was cool to be a part of it because it’s a quintessentially British brand and I’ve been doing so many American projects. I thought, ‘Oh, this is nice to get to have a little British association.’”
As much as he finds himself drawn to ambiguity and inscrutability, it is clear that Dickinson is an actor who knows exactly what he wants—and how to get it. “You either feel it or you don’t,” he says about choosing his projects. “I know it sounds crazy, but it could be the most amazing character, and someone else will probably do it justice, but sometimes I just don’t feel it. If that’s not right, if it’s not there, I probably shouldn’t do it.”
Trust premieres March 25 on FX. The Darkest Minds is out August 8.
- By
- Jonathan Shia
- Photography by
- Paolo Zerbini
Styling by Chiara Spennato. Grooming by Daniele Falzone at Atomo Management using Kevin Murphy. Photographer’s assistant: Sandra Furtschegger. Production by Elena Cimarosti at Atomo Management.