EXCLUSIVE: It is Frank Dillane’s first time attending the Cannes Film Festival. He arrived a virtual unknown as the lead in Harris Dickinson’s dire
EXCLUSIVE: It is Frank Dillane’s first time attending the Cannes Film Festival. He arrived a virtual unknown as the lead in Harris Dickinson’s directorial debut feature Urchin, shown in Un Certain Regard, and he will depart a star.
He notes with a hint of alarm in his voice that he hasn’t walked anywhere, “just been chauffeured around, given coffee,” and adds, “I haven’t seen any films, except our film.”
In the BFI- and BBCFilm-backed movie, Dillane plays Mike, a youthful man who’d known a better life in better days but had fallen through the cracks, landing with a challenging thud.
Sidewalks were for sleeping on and for running away from harm. And Mike did not trust himself to depend on the kindness of strangers because he lacked the empathy to understand an act of selfless charity.
RELATED: ‘Urchin’ Review: Harris Dickinson’s Knockout Directorial Debut Creates High Art From A Low, Sad Life – Cannes Film Festival
I asked Dillane whether he’d ever experienced life without a safety net.
“Well, my parents are very much a part of my life, and so as much as I might at times have pretended I had no safety net, at the end of the day, I could have just called my mum and she would’ve been like, ‘Come home, have some dinner, let’s talk it out.’ So if I’m honest, my mom and my dad have always been present in my life.”
What’s fascinating to me is that Mike’s a middle-class youthful man who, through circumstances of his upbringing, has been forced to sleep on the streets.
Dillane notes that it’s not unusual for middle-class folk to end up on the streets. “It is you or it is me … slipped through the net,” he says. “Usually a family member dies, they lose the house. And it’s happening more and more in London. I have friends who can’t get a job; rent’s gone up. If they don’t have that safety net of family, that can be quite fatal.
From left: Josée Deshaies, Archie Pearch, Frank Dillane, Harris Dickinson, Megan Northam and Scott O’Donnell at the ‘Urchin‘ photocall May 17 in Cannes (Victor Boyko/Getty Images)
“So I suppose that Harris and I really wanted to give Mike dignity, and being on the street, I think one of the main things that I felt is the dehumanization of it, how bad you can feel about yourself when people don’t look at you, if you don’t have nice clothes on. … You can have quite low self-esteem. And we wanted to make Mike a dignified full human,” says Dillane.
I observe that Mike’s never happier than when he’s cleaned up and wanting to look astute because no one wants to wake up in the morning with nowhere to wash and to put on fresh clothes, even if the garments are secondhand.
“Exactly,” he smiles. “This sort of idea that these little details of getting a nice new jumper or making a new friend or finding someone you like and maybe they’re like you or getting a job. We really wanted to make these things mean the world to Mike because why shouldn’t it? These things are real things,” Dillane says as we converse about what it’s like to live hand-to-mouth on a lower plane where concrete is your mattress.
It’s the fear and stress that you live under, says the actor, who spent a lot of time before cameras rolled embracing predicaments people like his character encounter.
He wandered around London “just everywhere,” finding the experience “exhausting,” he tells me.
“You’re carrying your stuff, your feet hurt, your back hurts. It’s the weather. You can never close a door. You can’t sit here, you can’t stand there, move it along. No one’s looking at you,” plus there’s no place to charge a cell, no loo readily available and no place to call home.
As if that’s not enough, add addiction to an ever-growing list of degradation. “It can be really brutal,” he explains.
Over and above what Dickinson poured into his screenplay, Dillane added further layers to build his character, as all good actors do, especially those lucky enough to have trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Initially, he was reluctant to divulge too much during our interview because, he says, “I sometimes feel as an actor, these things can sound a bit absurd. … I don’t want to also be glib or take away what I did for Mike. I don’t want to make a story out of it, if that makes sense.”
I nod, but I push for more because when an actor completely disappears and totally inhabits a role, as he does, I need to know how it’s achieved. At the same time, I sort of agree that the magic, as it were, of what an actor conjures on stage and screen shouldn’t be explored in too much depth.
Frank Dillane at Deadline Studio in Cannes
He slept on the streets to experience the actuality of it. “I did a lot of stuff … I spent a lot of time in soup kitchens, a lot of time with people, friends, walking around. … It’s odd, you know, an actor’s job is an odd one. So being out there, I mean, really, that’s the least I could do.”
Dillane had not worked with Dickinson before. He auditioned and says, “We just got on very quickly, and when he offered me the part, I just went for it straight away and we just began building together.”
He describes Harris as “a particular person. He’s a real voice, and I’m very privileged to have worked with him on his directorial [debut].”
He calls Urchin “my first” lead but acknowledges that he led director Chris Mul’s 2018 sci-fi horror movie Astral. “I haven’t seen it, I did it a long time ago,“ then he chuckles, wondering if, “maybe it will become a sort of cult movie in a few years.”
Certainly, Astral never had the benefit of a seemingly glamorous actor who appears on the covers of trendy magazines and his directorial debut is seen like something approaching the second coming.
As it happens, I know different. I first interviewed Dickinson on the set of Matthew Vaughn’s The King’s Man early in 2019, though I’d caught his breakthrough role in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats.
Both of those directors spoke to me of Dickinson’s ambition to direct and that each acting role and each glossy magazine cover was a means to garner visibility to enable him to raise funds to make his film.
Dickinson’s a London lad who determined a long time ago to show that the streets of his native city are not paved with gold. And I can see why he went with Dillane to front his film. He wanted what I would term a “proper” actor, and thank heaven for that.
They shot so much stuff, says Dillane, that Dickinson could’ve made many other films with the material. “It’s a a real testament to Harris’ vision that he was able to, for want of a better phrase, kill his babies. Because we had some great scenes that on their own were like, ‘This is so cool.’ But it’s great that Harris was able to be like, ‘Doesn’t fit the story. Get rid of it. This is the story, and if anything else is fat, get rid of it.’ Which I’m really happy he did that.”
However, there was a particular scene — which I won’t give away here — that Dillane was able to fight for.
After they shot the scene in question, “I went home and something wasn’t sitting right with me,” says Dillane. “I was like, ’What is it? What is it?’ And then I realized that I had played the scene wrong. … I called Harris. I was like, ‘We’ve got to reshoot. We’ve got to reshoot this scene.’ Because it was, in many ways, the real heart of the story that I had kind of glossed over.”
Dillane concedes “that was my mistake” but “luckily we were shooting in the same venue. So Harris agreed and we reshot it.”
Not every actor has the confidence to call it and to dissect where the moment had gone wrong. It’s partly down to training and perhaps the several seasons he shot playing Nick Clark in Fear the Walking Dead and the key roles he played in The Girlfriend Experience, The Essex Serpent, Renegade Nell and Joan.
Then, of course, there’s the part of Tom Riddle he played in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. To be on set in your teens with the cream of British acting and observed them counts for something.
Also, his parents are the distinguished actors Stephen Dillane (Sherwood, Darkest Hour) and Naomi Wirthner (Slow Horses, The Outrun), and having observed them surely helped, although in this instance, Dillane puts his boldness down to a close relationship with his director.
“Well, Harris, I think really trusted me,” says Dillane, “which is good. We would speak in the morning before work and in the evening coming home.”
But the character he plays doesn’t trust himself and lacks awareness and boundaries, factors that are challenging for an actor to convey effortlessly. But Dillane nails them.
And also the key for Dillane in understanding Mike was knowing that his parents gave him away to foster parents who didn’t love him. ”These scars are deep. They’re deep scars, and you can feel, I think, that Mike felt a bit unworthy. And this is where the dignity comes back in that it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, while my parents don’t love me and my foster parents obviously don’t love me, I’m a sort of burden on everyone.’ And yeah, there’s a kind of self-sufficiency that you develop.
“But also, I think Mike lives and dies in every breath. It’s like this moment is forever and only. And then suddenly another moment. And he hasn’t perceived that there will be a tomorrow. And yesterday did exist and last year existed. He is just for the now, for the here, which I think is beautiful. But it doesn’t lend itself to necessarily a kind of pragmatic, healthy, considered life. I suppose it makes it a little chaotic If you’re just living for the sky,” he says gently, as if wrapping a balmy blanket around Mike’s shoulders.
He’s grateful to have spent a few years working on Fear the Walking Dead and has kept in touch with Colman Domingo, who has become a powerful force for good in the industry. “He’s a proper person is Colman,” he says admiringly. “He’s like the sun or something. Being around him just feels so exciting. He’s such a movie star.”
The thespian arts, as noted earlier, are in his blood. He has a memory of being age “like four or something” and watching his father appear as Prior Walter in director Declan Donnellan’s production of Angels in America, Parts 1 & 2 at the National Theatre in 1993. “And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll do that.’ And then I spent a long time avoiding acting and I tried to do other things.”
Did he avoid acting because of his parents, I wondered?
“I guess there must’ve been some of that and also it kind of felt like it was an unavoidable thing as in I couldn’t. And now I’ve just grown to love it so, so much. But I certainly had a kind of love-hate relationship with it for a long time,” he admits.
It’s taken him a while to come down from playing Mike — actually “playing” is not the right word. The acting is hidden .
He says he had to fill himself with “suffering and pain and shame and all of those feelings you don’t want to feel.
“So I thought, ‘If I fill myself with enough of this stuff for long enough, eventually when we get to the set, I don’t have to do anything.’ So that was kind of how I approached it.”
But how does an actor expose himself to pain and suffering — and shame?
“Just by humoring those thoughts that Mike was humoring … and lending myself, lending my body, lending my brain to as much sort of suffering as possible. I don’t mean sadistically, I just mean soul suffering — pain, need, want, love, anger, hatred, all of those big feelings. Really try to open that vein as much as possible in order to arrive on set and just be.”
When Dickinson would call cut on a scene, Dillane would go and sit in a corner “and wait to be called again.”
Now, after the kind of Cannes he’s had with the world and Jennifer Lawrence and Paul Mescal going to the ultra-private afterparty, Frank Dillane is now ready for his next close-up.
COMMENTS