Ever since the new steamy thriller Babygirl was released, people have wondered who the younger man Nicole Kidman falls in love with is. Well, his name is Harris Dickinson and, as it turns out, he’s quite an accomplished actor best known for things like The Darkest Minds (2018), Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) and The Iron Claw (2023). Read on to learn more about him and discover what he thinks of the thrilling—and sort of romantic—film Babygirl.
The early days of Harris Dickinson
Dickinson was born on June 24, 1996, in East London, United Kingdom, and always knew he wanted to be an actor. He attended the highly respected art-specialized RAW Academy there before going on to star in several different theater roles in 2014. He even wrote his own short film during that time as well.
It wasn’t until 2017, though, that Dickinson really made a name for himself thanks to his role in the 2017 teenage love story Beach Rats.
“I got sent the script from New York, and I was told it was a very small indie from Eliza Hittman. I looked up Eliza, watched her film and then read the script – really enjoyed it, really loved the character’s struggle and thought it would be a challenge to portray and an interesting psychology to jump into,” Dickinson said in 2017. “Then I just put myself on tape for it, sent it off, we had a very good Skype chat and then that was it.”
After that, Dickinson was cast in the film adaptation of Alexandra Bracken’s The Darkest Minds (2018), making him a fan favorite for readers everywhere.
Harris Dickinson gets cast in ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’
Following The Darkest Minds (2018), Dickinson continued to work on various films, such as Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), The Souvenir: Part II (2021), and The King’s Man (2021). Then, in 2022, he was cast as Chase Andrews in the highly anticipated adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing.
“We [Dickinson and co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones] struggled to keep serious on that film,” the actor said. “We struggled not to crack up because we were two Brits playing these very regional Louisiana characters. And I had a broken foot on that job, so I sort of was limping about, and I think she laughed at me a lot.”
Where the Crawdads Sing made $17,253,227 on its opening weekend and a worldwide total of $144,353,965, making it one of the most successful book-to-screen adaptations since Harry Potter.
Harris Dickinson’s thoughts on ‘The Iron Claw’ and ‘A Murder at The End of The World’
Two years after leaving Louisiana behind, Dickinson decided to go back in time and portray the professional wrestler David Von Erich in the hit 2023 film The Iron Claw.
The story was inspired by the real-life Texas-based wrestling royalty Von Erich family and starred celebrities like Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Lily James.
“I did a deep dive on David and the [Von Erich] family. I researched it for about three months before, and I tried to keep David’s mannerisms, who he was and how he spoke. I tried to find that pretty intensely,” Dickinson said. “I wanted to do it justice. So, yeah, there were a lot of elements of him that weren’t in the film. I really wanted there to be a moment where we understood how much he loved his horses and the farm, but there wasn’t quite a moment for it.”
Also that year, Dickinson starred in the BAFTA-nominated miniseries A Murder at The End of The World, which he said made him want to “reject” artificial intelligence.
“It’s a really difficult subject because, in so many ways, it’s advanced things in medicine and in various different fields,” Dickinson continued. “But it’s frightening. Even learning more about how people write emails on ChatGPT and formulating their thoughts and intellectual ideas around someone else’s or something else’s—[it’s] just a bizarre place to be.”
Harris Dickinson enters into his ‘Babygirl’ era
Most recently, Dickinson has been capturing people’s hearts for his sexy—and somewhat scary—role in Babygirl. The film follows a single mother and CEO named Romy (Kidman) as she enters into a scandalous love affair with a young intern named Samuel (Dickinson).
“I was fascinated by the writing and the character because I didn’t really know what I would do with it,” Dickinson said. “It scared me a little bit in the sense of, ‘I don’t know how exactly best to do this in a way that’s going to elevate the rest of the story.’ But that’s why it eventually led me to do it.”
“Ultimately, it’s about two people dealing with the present moment more than anything. [It’s about] their confrontation with their own ideals and desires. So you start seeing [a scene] in one way, and then it goes differently, and then it ends in an extremely different way.”
Babygirl is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and earned over $63 million at the box office.
The Personal Life of Harris Dickinson
Sadly (depending on your point of view), Dickinson is not single. Instead, he has been dating a singer named Rose Grey, who he met while studying at the RAW Academy.
For the most part, the two do prefer to keep their relationship private, but over the years, Dickinson has starred in and directed a few of Grey’s music videos.
Harris Dickinson and Rose Grey in 2022Karwai Tang/WireImage/Getty“We’re so close that we can just be very direct. And I think she was the same with me, where if I had a crap idea, she’d say, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’”
As of publication, the pair has not gotten engaged, but they share a cat named Misty Blue.
