The co-star who “humiliated” Harris Dickinson: “He’s a wanker”
Britain might be a small island, but it hasn’t half producer some incredible actors.
In fact, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, past and present, have emerged from across the pond, like Daniel Day-Lewis, Christian Bale, Emily Blunt and Kate Winslet. Is there something in the water that makes Brits so well-suited for the job?
The thing is, an overwhelming amount of British actors have come from well-educated backgrounds, think Benedict Cumberbatch or Florence Pugh, which has given them a significant head start in the industry. The class divide between British actors remains stark, with a staggering decline in the number of working-class actors occurring over the past few decades. While the 1960s gave rise to British social realist dramas featuring genuine working-class actors like Michael Caine or Rita Tushingham, the country’s acting scene has since been overtaken by private schoolers.
According to a study by The Guardian, 35% of Bafta-nominated actors had emerged from private schools, which is a huge number considering just how expensive public schools are. Still, despite these depressing statistics, there are certain actors who are flying the flag for working-class creatives in the film industry, like Harris Dickinson.
The actor will be playing John Lennon in the hugely-anticipated Beatles biopic, and he’s already racked up credits in acclaimed films like Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl, and The Iron Claw, but he admits that his background as a state-school-educated, working-class Londoner was the subject of ridicule by a certain actor in the past.
You’d think that an established star would be old enough not to stoop to teasing a young actor about their class background, but Dickinson unfortunately experienced this first-hand when working on one of his first Hollywood films, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.
Initially refusing to reveal the culprit, Dickinson told The Times, “I had an experience of an older actor on set, I won’t say who it is, and I really want to, because he’s a wanker. But we did a film, and he was old school, middle to upper class, had done the rounds, TV, theatre. He wanted to play a game. The idea was that he would embody someone in the room and people would ask questions to try and work out who it was.”
The actor brought up things like fish and chips and Love Island, and Dickinson soon realised that he was having his background ridiculed. “It was becoming quite clear that the only person he could’ve been talking about was me. Fish ’n’ chips is a stereotypical working-class food, Love Island is culturally low, while lukewarm is insulting. He said, ‘I’m Harris, of course!’ He humiliated me in front of all of these other actors, and it’s difficult for that not to affect you, especially if you’re young.”
So, who was the actor? In another interview with The Times, Dickinson managed to give him away, with the interviewer telling him that some readers guessed it could be Robert Lindsay, better known for his tenure as a stalwart theatre star. “Fuck! I’ve been caught!,” was Dickinson’s response. Clearly, the country’s sharp class division is still firmly rooted in every industry, and even Dickinson, who had secured himself a place in a Hollywood film alongside Lindsay, couldn’t escape class-based ridicule.
