Like Lennon, Dickinson seems slyly unknowable. There’s a stillness and slight hesitation to him as he speaks, offsetting tired responses with a smooth deadpan and half smile. When asked if he ever knowingly deploys his charms, he replies, “Yes. I’m good with old people if I need to be.” But overall, “I don’t think I’d describe myself as charming. Someone that thinks they’re charming is probably obnoxious, is the honest answer.” When Dickinson auditioned to play a male model in Triangle of Sadness, director Ruben Östlund immediately dismissed the actor as being “too shy to really give me what I wanted,” as he told Dazed last year. But within a half hour of improv, Östlund recalled, the actor was screaming profanities “with a full-on authentic volcanic anger. I had never before seen a similar transition.”
Dickinson is also comfortable exploring his characters’ sexuality and secret desires, as he did in his 2017 indie breakthrough, Beach Rats. “I can hide between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” he says of his onscreen disappearing acts. “There’s a very safe, liminal space that I can exist in and be the most annoying or the most confident.” That space allowed for a chemistry so crackling in Babygirl that Dickinson has since been confronted by older women telling him their most provocative sexual fantasies: “There were some deeply inappropriate comments made to me by women after that film. I’m glad it started a conversation and people felt sexually liberated by it. It’s something you can laugh off, but it’s not necessarily acceptable.” I ask whether his emotionally wrenching roles have haunted him afterward—not via lecherous fans, but via his own psyche reverberating the pain of his performances. “There’s no question it can get under your skin and affect your being,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like someone who’s taking himself too seriously, even though I like to take my work seriously. I care about it a great deal.”
Set Design Julia Wagner; DP Shane Sigler; Location Ealing Studios; Groomer Liz Taw; Manicurist Adam Slee; Produced by Casa Projects. For details, go to VF.com/credits.