PARIS: He’s acted as Nicole Kidman’s love interest, delivered an acclaimed directorial debut, and been cast in Sam Mendes’ upcoming “The Beatles” films, but Britain’s Harris Dickinson insists he’s keeping his feet on the ground.
The modest Londoner, who turns 30 later this year, has had a whirlwind year that has seen his stock rise further as an actor who can straddle both art house cinema and more commercial TV and film work.
But the “Babygirl” star and upcoming on-screen John Lennon insists he won’t be swapping Hollywood for his beloved home in the British capital — now or ever.
“It feels like I’m grounded by London, east London specifically. It feels like a very important place,” he told AFP in an interview.
“I have my people. I have my family. I have my own little community there,” he added.
The city is the backdrop to “Urchin,” his first film as a director which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May and which includes a cameo from his mum.
’Stay on track’
The premiere in Cannes, where he starred in 2022 prize-winner “Triangle of Sadness” by Ruben Ostlund, was so stressful Dickinson felt sick before the screening.
But his film, about a homeless man struggling after his release from prison, won over critics with the strength of the acting and directing, as well as its wry humor.
Dickinson sees it as containing an important message about community: the importance of it, as well as the dangers for drug users of “exhausting (their) support networks.”
“It’s very common, even for people with good family setups, or friends and family, they get to a point where no one wants to help them anymore,” he said.
Keeping destructive behavior at bay is a battle he relates to, having seen the ravages of alcohol in his family — but also as a member of the notoriously addiction-prone entertainment industry.
“Ultimately no one’s safety or path is guaranteed. You have to do a certain amount of work in order to stay on track, especially if you’ve got addictive tendencies or destructive tendencies,” he explained.
’Get obsessed’
Dickinson is currently in the middle of an exhausting filming schedule for four biographical films about “The Beatles” from “American Beauty” and James Bond director Mendes.
Each one is shot from the perspective of one of the Fab Four, with Dickinson landing what is arguably the plum role as Lennon.
Paul Mescal (“Hamnet,” “Gladiator II“) plays Paul McCartney.
“I’m getting up at 4:45 am every day, and I’m getting home at 8:00 pm,” Dickinson explained.
Working with Mendes has made a big impression — “he’s a big canvas director” — but one of the hardest things is pulling himself out of the daily news doom cycle and his research into the 1960s.
“I do go through periods where I tune out from news a little bit because I can get obsessed with it. I go deep, and I get very troubled by it,” Dickinson explained.
“I don’t think our brains and our systems are designed to be that tuned into injustice and tragedy and darkness.”
The troubled post-war era “doesn’t feel any different to what we’re going through today, that’s the alarming thing really,” he added.
“The Beatles” is a long-term job that will keep him busy until December.
After that?
“I’m quite interested in anything apocalyptic, anything dystopian, or a survival film,” he explained.
“I’m interested in the idea of what happens when society falls, what happens when we are left with nothing or we’re stripped of everything.”
Britain’s Harris Dickinson on John Lennon, directing and news overload
https://arab.news/9n92e
Britain’s Harris Dickinson on John Lennon, directing and news overload
- He’s acted as Nicole Kidman’s love interest, delivered an acclaimed directorial debut, and been cast in Sam Mendes’ upcoming “The Beatles” films
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
