‘I Feel A Great Responsibly To The Character To Portray Him With Dignity’

‘Urchin’, directed by Harris Dickinson, starring Frank Dillane as Mike

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Frank Dillane portrays Mike, a homeless person living on the streets of London and struggling with addictions in Harris Dickinson’s directorial debut, Urchin. Fresh off his success for his role in Babygirl last year, the actor directs his first feature with all the sensitivity and humanity a subject such as the one addressed in Urchin deserves.

Dillane, who’s well-known for starring in Fear The Walking Dead and who will soon star in upcoming Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, delivers a brilliantly layered and emotional performance in Urchin. I caught up with the actor over Zoom last week, and asked him about the most interesting aspects of working with an actor-turned-director.

“It was very refreshing to me to work with an actor-director. Harris was very involved in the creative process and he was very hands on,” Dillane told me.

He added: “He pushed me in directions that I feel only an actor can know how to push another actor in. He also held space for experimentation, he wasn’t intimated or freaked out by any of my weirdest choices, he knew that I was throwing paint against the wall. It was a really good thing, actor-directors are possibly becoming rarer and rarer, I think, as the movie industry becomes more and more visual. The actor can feel like sometimes you are a bit of another prop or something like that, which is fine, and I enjoy working with all types of director. But it’s really nice when someone gets really involved in the emotional journey and it’s interesting that part of filmmaking.”

Dillane’s raw portrayal of Mike is also a very intense and challenging one. The character’s journey while working on himself also includes facing his demons and many addictions. At the beginning of the film, Mike beats up a man who was going to buy him some food, and he steals his belongings. Mike is arrested and after his release, his life is turned upside down, possibly for the best. When he’s released, his probation supervisor finds him a room in a hostel and a job in a small restaurant.

“I think the most challenging, daunting thing to me, was the sort of circumstances that Mike finds himself in, that are in many ways alien for me,” Dillane said.

He added: “I come from very a middle-class background, I have a very supportive family behind me, I live in a flat. The kind of life that Mike is living is one that I knew would involve a certain amount of suffering and as human beings, we tend to want to escape suffering. But as an actor or artist, sometimes you have to go towards the things you are frightened of. I feel a great responsibly to the character to portray him with dignity and hold my character’s hand through the story and be with him through it. I was certainly daunted by some of the themes I knew I had to explore.”

But as Mike starts his new life, meets new friends, goes to karaoke and becomes sober, he also learns to stand up for himself. In one particular scene, he calls out another probation officer when he felt he was being patronizing. In the previous scene, Mike has a disagreement with one of the restaurant’s client, who was unhappy with the way his meat was cooked. While Mike doesn’t agree with the client, we can guess that this is the moment he realized he should also learn to stand up for himself.

Dillane said, “I think you said it quite well yourself, I think he’s used to feeling like he doesn’t have a voice and he is used to not being heard. As he gets sober in his feelings, his sense of self begins to return. He feels justified in speaking up for himself, it’s a shame that it all happens on those particular circumstances. But I feel this in life sometimes, you know, you try to stand up for yourself, and it can be the wrong moment, and make the situation worst. Sometimes you don’t stand up for yourself at time when you should. It’s a very human struggle that I certainly feel.”

When Mike’s probation officer organizes a meeting between Mike and the man he attacked on the street, things soon turn awry and the young man falls back into his old ways. I asked Dillane if he felt like that meeting was a mistake on the officer and the system’s end, and that Mike was still too fragile to face his victim.

He said, “It’s very difficult to face your past sometimes and accept your failures or where you made mistakes. It can be a very difficult thing to do. If you don’t have that support around you to hold you through everything, your past demons or whatever it is, those demons can eat you alive. You need to have quite a strong foundation to face something.”

He added: “Mike’s trying to face his mistakes and humanity as well in many ways. I mean ‘humanity’ is maybe the wrong word, but it’s a doggy-dog world so, Mike is sorry that he stole the guy’s money and his watch, but also, he was down and trying to play the cards that was dealt to him. Feelings of shame and humiliation and hearing that the guy had a daughter, I think he gets swallowed by too many monsters he’s not able to comprehend properly.”