Babygirl’s Harris Dickinson: ‘Being desired is not something I’ve been particularly used to’
Babygirl’s Harris Dickinson: ‘Being desired is not something I’ve been particularly used to’
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The sought-after British star of ‘Triangle of Sadness’ and ‘The Iron Claw’ speaks to Adam White about shooting graphic BDSM scenes with Nicole Kidman in his provocative new thriller, privilege in the acting industry, and why he’d hate for his looks to be his ‘sole currency’.
![[In at the deep end: Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in ‘Babygirl’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/08/15/BG_08174-Enhanced-NR-Edit_New.jpg)
Before he bossed her about and fed her dog biscuits, Harris Dickinson didn’t know much about Nicole Kidman. He knew her films, of course, but Kidman herself – the woman behind all that cryptic, porcelain, slightly alien elegance – seemed a bit removed on the set of their BDSM drama Babygirl. “We didn’t talk a load,” Dickinson says, lying prone across a hotel-room sofa. “We talked a lot about the characters we were playing. We didn’t talk about our personal lives, or our feelings.”.
![[Rough-hewn: Dickinson in his film debut, 2017’s ‘Beach Rats’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/10/newFile-3.jpg)
He and Kidman are close now, but it was (almost) all business while making Babygirl, a frisky, funny plunge into erotic chaos and sub-dom mechanics that’s now in cinemas. She had to play the perma-Botoxed tech CEO who can’t climax with her husband; he had to play the smirking intern who, like a randy telepath, senses in her a desperate urge to be treated like a very naughty girl who needs a good spanking. And it was hard!.
![[‘Beaches’ for boys: Jeremy Allen White, Dickinson, Michael J Harney and Zac Efron, pre-misery, in ‘The Iron Claw’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/10/TV-Comp-CFEdit.jpg)
Dickinson may be one of Britain’s most sought-after Hollywood exports – a wiry hunk with grit, humour and slippery vulnerability, whether it’s as the desperate supermodel of the satirical comedy Triangle of Sadness or the second fallen son of last year’s wrestling weepie The Iron Claw. But still: this is the Nicole Kidman. Acting royalty with a laundry list of bangers to her name. Dickinson respected the distance between them, not wanting to distract her from her process. But could he...? Just once...?.
