When some enterprising director gets around to making Pete Doherty: The Movie, Frank Dillane won’t need to audition. With his black leather jacket, bed-head and baby face, this could be the youthful Libertines frontman seated before me next to a potted plant in an east London cafe. Unlike the young Doherty, however, the actor’s drug of choice is a flat white. And he isn’t hell-bent on sabotaging his career. Not any more.
After playing the haunted, drug-addicted Nick Clark in four seasons of the zombie TV spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, Dillane, now 34, fled to Berlin for two years and turned his back on fame. A glance at some of the video interviews he did to promote the show is enough to explain why: he looks at best fidgety, at worst bored and resentful.
I grew facial hair for the film but I shaved it all off. It spoilt the innocent effect – I looked like a cartel boss
“Nick was a junkie, and my work on the show was all about understanding him,” he says, toying with the three gold rings on his right hand. “Then I’d be asked all these questions that trivialised what I’d done.” Behind the scenes, there were stern words about his behaviour. “I was told to talk differently, dress differently, attend media training.” Did he? “No. I was a young, bloody-minded artist!” Eyes crinkling, he gives a wheezy laugh. His Artful Dodger charm could disarm a warmonger.
Bad fit … Dillane as Nick in Fear the Walking Dead. Photograph: Justin Lubin/AMC
That hiatus in Berlin temporarily arrested his ascent. “Straight after Fear the Walking Dead was the moment to capitalise on everything and do this film or that film,” he reflects. “But I didn’t want it.”
He does now. Fortunately, the perfect vehicle to relaunch himself, and to show off his range and sensitivity, has arrived in the shape of Urchin, the directorial debut of Harris Dickinson, star of Babygirl. Dillane plays Mike, an unhoused Londoner ricocheting from pavement to prison to hostel. An odyssey that could have been punishingly bleak is redeemed partly by the actor’s sheer ebullience. Whether chancing upon a pair of snakeskin loafers in a charity shop, presenting his probation officer with a miniature cactus or belting out a karaoke rendition of Atomic Kitten’s Whole Again, Mike stays upbeat when the chips are down, which is most of the time.
Even when he is bad, the good still peeks through: knocking a stranger to the ground, he mutters his apologies as he raids his victim’s pockets. “There’s a childishness that I wanted to achieve with him,” says Dillane, crossing one leg over the other and exposing pale pink socks worn with battered penny loafers. “Early on, I grew facial hair for the film, but then I shaved it all off. It spoilt the innocent effect when I looked like a cartel boss.”
Genial he may be but Dillane is in no hurry to discuss his preparation for Urchin. He confirms that the begging scenes are authentic, shot on busy streets using a long lens: “People ignore you when you approach them. It makes you feel like you’re not human.” What he won’t reveal is whether he slept rough, as has previously been reported, or what sort of history he mapped out for Mike. “I want to keep that stuff to myself. You guys have the film.”
When I inquire after the character’s body language, he lets out a mock-huff – “Fine!” – and admits that he did a drawing of Mike before shooting began. “I wrote a trauma in each joint. His right foot is held like that because of an injury. His leg is like that because of the time some girl rejected him. He holds his back that way from the stress of when he got shouted at. He’s carrying everything around with him.”
At first, Dillane wondered if race might be an impediment to playing Mike. “I saw him as a white kid from an estate in England,” he says. “But my mum’s Jamaican so I don’t classify myself as white. I’ll often get cast as posh white people. The posh thing I’ll take. I’m not going to pretend I’ve had an upbringing like Mike.”
Out for fun …… from left, Karyna Khymchuk, Dillane and Shonagh Marie in Urchin. Photograph: Everett/Shutterstock
Far from it. After spending his early years in south London, he moved with his parents – actors Naomi Wirthner (Slow Horses) and Stephen Dillane (Sherwood, Game of Thrones) – to Forest Row, East Sussex, which was named Britain’s third poshest village in a 2023 Times poll. “Third poshest?” he gasps. “Third weirdest, maybe. There’s a lot of Scientology there.”
Back to race. “I was the darkest person in the school when I got to Sussex. And I’ve had the experience of being paled up for roles, blue contact lenses, that kind of stuff. Like when I played Voldemort.”
At 18, Dillane starred as the villain’s younger incarnation, Tom Riddle, the Teen Who Must Not Be Named, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. He has since notched up numerous period roles, from a highwayman in Sally Wainwright’s Renegade Nell to a doctor in The Essex Serpent. He will next be seen alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones in a new film of Sense and Sensibility, in which he plays Mr Willoughby. “He’s a car crash,” he says fondly. In an age before cars? “Yeah. A carriage crash!”
It seems to have only just dawned on Dillane that he has spent much of his career in period dress. “I’ve done a lot of that stuff, haven’t I? Maybe I’m being shortsighted thinking that mixed-race people can’t do posh period roles.” He drums his hands on the table. “I feel like I’m unravelling as I’m getting into this with you. I should be talking to my therapist about it.”
Period piece … Dillane as Charles Devereux in Renegade Nell. Photograph: Disney +
The trick with capturing Mike, he discovered, was to see beyond race. “I had this idea of the human animal. Like, if you take a human being and remove their security, family, friends, home, then what are you left with? It’s all about humanity.” That shines through. No wonder he took home a best actor prize from the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes this year.
Any tension between the dire circumstances in which Mike finds himself, and his determination, verging on zeal, to make the best of things, is vital to the movie. It almost broke Dillane’s heart. “Mike’s thinking, ‘Everything’s going to be fine’. And then it isn’t. That was difficult to achieve. Harris had to keep reminding me: ‘This is an optimistic moment.’ For me, it’s all so sad, you know?” He gets a faraway look, his eyes gleaming with tears. “My experience of researching and working on the film was one of intense suffering. Not just personal suffering but the impotence of not being able to help people: their fragility, their addiction.”
He talks passionately about inequality and the consolidation of wealth, and his time spent working for a homelessness charity long before he was cast in Urchin. I wonder how that sits with his education at the fee-paying Michael Hall school, which proudly posted about his Cannes win on its Facebook page. (The post earned 42 likes.)
“Yeah, but I went to a Steiner school before that,” he says. “It was three caravans in a field. Also, when I went to Rada, the fee wasn’t what it is today. It’s really expensive now.” He mulls this over. “I guess it is kind of embarrassing. We all have our privilege. I do hold guilt for it, I suppose.” Then there is his status as a nepo baby. “Nep-oh-tism. It’s quite a nice word, isn’t it? Look, I dunno. Acting is just what my family always did. What does your dad do?” Finding that the answer isn’t journalism, he relents. “Maybe it’s different for writers.”
Still, no one who sees Urchin could accuse Dillane of coasting on the family name. Playing Mike has fundamentally changed him, he insists. “My humanity is broader. I’m sorry to bring Jesus into this, but Jesus went among the lepers. He gave time, energy and love. Giving yourself to a situation, to a person, without the endgame of fixing them can be helpful. People want quick, simple solutions to complex problems like homelessness. But there aren’t any. Your willpower alone will not fix the world.”
Urchin has also rejuvenated his career prospects. “I wasn’t engaging with any of it before in the way that, say, Timothée Chalamet does. He’s fucking on it, right? And he loves it. I see myself now as more like that. Talking to my agents, turning up looking neat, trying this and chasing that and la-la-la-la-la.”
As we head off together into the drizzly afternoon, Dillane clutching a black satchel, he admits to being nervous when he strolled into the cafe an hour earlier. “I wanted to paint a good picture of myself and not dwell too much on my mistakes,” he says. “A lot of my existence now involves the older me coming to terms with choices that the younger me made: ‘You turned down what?’ And: ‘I can’t go back and change that’ It’s like: ‘No. So now what do you do?’” The answer seems obvious. You do more good films. More films like Urchin.
Urchin released on 3 October
