Leveling Up

Becoming a breakout actor is one thing. With his acclaimed film Urchin, Harris Dickinson, 29, has added another line to his résumé: writer-director to watch.

- Liam Hess

READY OR NOT "I've been wanting to make films my whole life, and I've earned my stripes in order to get to this place," says Dickinson, who wears Prada. Grooming, Liz Taw. Details, see In This Issue. Sittings Editor: Michael Philouze.

“Be down in a minute!” a cheery voice crackles through the intercom. It’s a balmy late-July afternoon in east London, and I’ve just rung the buzzer of an old schoolhouse, now a hub of offices for fashion types. Within moments, the rangy 29-year-old actor Harris Dickinson bounds down an exterior staircase and shakes my hand. “Did you come far?” he asks.

We're a few miles away from the London film-industry hub of Soho, in a neighborhood of modish restaurants and cafés where Dickinson has situated his production company, Devisio Pictures. He’s practically in camouflage here, in a white T-shirt, cargo pants, and Adidas Sambas, and his office vibe is that of a scrappy but flourishing start-up: vintage film posters, potted plants, a kaleidoscopic array of herbal teas. “I made the first rough cut of Urchin on those,” Dickinson says, pointing toward giant monitors on a desk in the corner.

Urchin—which Dickinson wrote and directed—premiered just two months before at Cannes, where Dickinson processed down the Croisette in double-breasted Prada, paparazzi flashsbulbs lighting his Modigliani features. We're a million miles from all that here. “I'd never been so nervous in my life,” Dickinson says. “I was terrified. I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown 10 minutes before we went into the screening.”

But the reception was ecstatic: