Rising Tide

Harris Dickinson came out of nowhere to deliver a haunting debut performance in beach rats. he’s about to be everywhere.

- David Peisner

Moviegoers’ first real glimpse of Harris Dickinson will go like this: flickering shots of his bare, well-toned torso posing in front of a mirror under dim lighting in the opening moments of Eliza Hittman’s film Beach Rats. It’s an arresting introduction to an actor in his first starring role, with Dickinson playing Frankie, a brooding, not particularly talkative Brooklyn teen struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. He spends much of Beach Rats wearing little more than a pair of shorts—and often much, much less—but most of the film’s story plays out in subtle motions and slight grimaces across his face. It’s impossible to take your eyes off him.

In person, the six-foot-tall Londoner cuts a more demure but still remarkably self-assured figure. On a bright, clear Friday morning in June, Dickinson sits at a table outside the Georgian Terrace, a historic Beaux-Arts-style hotel in Atlanta that has been his home for the past three months, with his dirty blond hair tucked under a baseball hat and his torso well-covered by a navy T-shirt that reads SILENCE...IS GOLDEN. Beach Rats won Hittman a jury prize at Sundance this year and has earned Dickinson serious buzz as a potential Next Big Thing. He’s been in Atlanta filming The Darkest Minds alongside Amandla Stenberg, an adaptation of the popular YA book of the same name. On Tuesday, he begins a five-month shoot for Trust, an FX limited series, in which he’ll play the grandson of billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. It’s all been a lot to take in for the 21-year-old.