“I had to find the reality of what death looks like and sounds like.”
Spoilers follow for the series A Murder at the End of the World through its sixth episode, “Chapter 6: Crime Seen.”
To care about who committed the titular crime in A Murder at the End of the World, one must care about the person being murdered. That’s where Harris Dickinson’s Bill Farrah comes in. A heavily tattooed, unfailingly soft-spoken investigator who becomes known as the guerrilla artist FANGS after a summer spent chasing a serial killer, falling in love, and getting his heart broken by Emma Corrin’s Darby Shaw, Bill is a deeply likable character long before we see him choke on his own blood in front of the woman he hasn’t seen in six years. He’s the guy who stepped in front of Darby to protect her from a man pointing a gun at them, the guy who coaxes her into a sing-along to ease her nerves, and the guy whose emotional forthrightness is still enough to unnerve Darby — and enough to inspire her to find his killer. For Dickinson, who spends our interview doodling, Bill’s mixture of art talent and affective openness was a major draw, and it synced up with a sliding-doors version of what the Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, and The Iron Claw actor’s life could have been.
“Art was the only subject in school I really excelled in. Everything else, I was kind of rubbish at, and art still now is the only thing that can calm my mind and separate me from stuff,” Dickinson says after holding his sketch of curving lines and abstract shapes up to the camera on our Zoom. “Also, I got to have a mullet. It’s always a nice thing to get to have for a bit.”
Dickinson uses that mullet as another layer of singularity in his performance of Bill, who in the series’ sixth episode voices a disdain for our obsessive need to try and understand why men hurt women. That “he’s the result of faulty programming” speech is a key moment in A Murder at the End of the World voicing its wariness for the true-crime genre and arguing that misogyny isn’t worth our attempt at interpretation, and its effectiveness comes from Bill’s fatigued attempt to connect with Darby one final time. From the beginning of the series, we’ve known that Bill and Darby don’t end up together, but what “Chapter 6: Crime Seen” clarifies through Dickinson’s performance is the “element of realism — pessimism” that the actor says Bill and Darby could never get over, and which serves as an integral emotional beat for the series as it approaches next week’s finale.
What was it about Bill that excited you?
I loved Bill because he was an artist, and I think there was a version of me where I would have gone and done that. I love that he was an anarchist at heart. He wanted to disrupt the natural order of things and question things and interrogate authority and challenge the status quo. I try and do that, when I’m not too scared of what backlash I might get. And he’s righteous. He wants to do the right thing and he wants to connect with Darby in the right way. I think his past was sort of tumultuous and unclear, and that was interesting to me as an actor.
We see Bill when he’s a 21-year-old investigating the serial killer with Darby, and six years later, when he’s become the guerrilla artist FANGS and is known around the world, but hasn’t spoken to Darby in the meantime. How did you use your performance to differentiate him between those time periods?
I wanted to definitely try and make him more of an adult and more affected, but in a way that was like the way we all become affected with age and experience and how inevitably, society makes us — unless we’re completely free of social pressures — conform a little bit. We tend to become more risk-averse. We seek structure more and we seek safety more. I wanted to bring that into him and find a version of him that was slightly more focused. We didn’t spend much time with him in that new world, so it was trying to convey that in a short period of time.
So how did you convey that?
Costume did it a little bit. The costume that he was in at the retreat was slightly more refined, a little bit more mature. He’s calm. His focus has become specific. The conversation he has with Darby about why he left, when he explains to her how difficult it was to be in love with someone like Darby at that period of time — I think it’s the capacity to have that conversation that he couldn’t have back then, when he was younger and confused.
Speaking of costuming, Bill is covered in tattoos. Did you have a favorite or least favorite tattoo of Bill’s?
I love the face one, because it sometimes stayed on for a few days and people would always look at me out on in the shops and in restaurants and be like, “What is that on his face? Is it a squiggle?” The neck one went so high up that people were always like, “Oh, he’s done that, okay!” My least favorite was the back one because it took so long, so long. I was in makeup for like two hours every morning and then removing them at night.
Bill is well-known for his guerrilla art as FANGS. Did you intentionally think about Bill’s idea of fame when working on the character?
It is important to establish whether someone is self-aware of their profile or positioning within the world. I think he’s aware that he’s caused certain disruptions in the art world. But I don’t think it’s part of his DNA that he’s become well known. He probably rejects that idea. I thought about that a lot: How much is he leaning into this public image? I think really he wanted to create FANGS so he could be anonymous, and to some degree he still is.
Darby is perhaps the only person who genuinely knew at least one version of him. You and Emma have to exude a believable bond so we understand why Darby would be so motivated to find out who killed Bill. How did you two work together?
Emma and I became very close. We’ve got similar sensibilities with our work and our acting. We connected really quickly and that was important because I think the closer you can get with someone that you’re working with in that sense, the quicker you can get to the truth, the quicker you can get to the more interesting version of a scene.
I was there to support Emma. Emma’s carrying this whole show from every frame, and my side story was just a part of the show. I was just trying to be there and do the work and make sure I was ready. We had a lot of fun. Utah was really silly. We were in these strange environments together and we’re two Brits just messing around, cracking jokes all the time. We couldn’t help it. It’s an absurd thing to be on set with all these people, and you have a shared experience of it. When you’re tired, things become more funny. When they’re not supposed to be funny, they become funnier.
Early in the series, Bill and Darby sing together to Annie Lennox’s “No More ‘I Love You’s’” while driving around Utah. Bill is really putting himself out there by singing first, and then Darby picks it up. It tells us so much about their relationship right from the beginning. How did that scene play out for you?
Clearly I won’t be getting a record deal anytime soon with that voice. Awful, awful, awful singing. I wish they would have just called a singer up and said, “Will you dub this actor?” That was one of the last things we did. There was such a closeness to us. It was sad but happy. I started head banging at one point in between [takes], and Brit was like “Do that, do that.” It was about trying to create a feeling of freedom and closeness.
Do you personally have a go-to sing-along song in the car?
Sia’s “Chandelier” or “Elastic Heart.” You can shout it, you can belt it, it’s very uplifting, I find.
In that same episode, Bill dies, which is incredibly traumatic for Darby and for us. It’s bloody, it’s prolonged. How much were you being interrupted during that performance to get blood placed on you, to do different takes?
Very often. There’s no way of being like, “I’mma just stay in it. I’mma just stay in it and find it,” because people need to put blood on, people need to adjust your clothes. I had to find the reality of what death looks like and sounds like — it’s so bleak and so dark — and you’re just thinking about how to portray that. You find yourself in these weird sort of Google searches about the death rattle. And then there was a moment where Charlotte Bruus Christensen, our DOP — I was in the middle of dying, and she would be like, “Harris, can you just sit up a little bit, and then die?” [Laughs] How do you expect me to do that, come in and out like that? It’s really difficult because there’s a lot of things people need from that moment. It’s not always about just what the actors are doing. There’s a lot of technical stuff going on.
In “Chapter 6: Crime Seen,” Bill and Darby have escaped from the serial killer they were hunting, and they have a conversation about him in which they take opposite sides. Bill says the killer is the result of “faulty programming” and doesn’t have a deeper meaning we should honor, and that feels like a core thesis in the show — that our fascination with true crime focuses on the men who do these awful things rather than their victims. How did you and Emma work together on that scene?
I love what you’ve picked up on. I think it is a really important point of this show, that the victims are named and Darby has a real strong, strong desire to find the perpetrator and one of the victims. But it also became, in terms of the characters and their story line, how much of this was actually gonna help, and how much of this was purely about Darby’s pride? We want to do things to get a sort of prize at the end of it; whether that is an achievement or a pat on the back or this inner feeling of, Oh, I’ve done it, there is a reason we do it. And so there was the battle of Bill being like, “Are we really gonna continue putting ourselves in this position and enter in dangerous situations? Or do we sort of just accept that this is the way it is and we’re not going to be able to change it?” There’s an element of realism — pessimism — with Bill that I don’t think Darby was willing to accept, and that ultimately became their pitfall because they couldn’t find a way to proceed. That scene was a big moment for the two of them because it was a point of collision where he decided to challenge [Darby], but also challenge himself because he’s been going along with it and doing it.
There was another scene in the motel where it’s the first time we fully connect, and it’s real and we communicate properly. That was cool because it was getting into the dynamic of how you express love and intimacy with someone that you don’t fully know. It’s a challenging one as well, because Emma and I were so silly with each other. We were just so close at that point that the more sincere scenes were actually becoming the harder ones because we couldn’t keep serious.
This show has a strong “the very wealthy are out of touch with reality and have their own agenda” message, and the Ruben Östlund film you were in, Triangle of Sadness, did something similar. I’m wondering if this commentary on capitalism is something you’re personally looking to explore through your work?
Yeah, I only want to do films and TV that are exploring that — I wanna take them down. [Laughs] No, on a real note, I think that it’s just been a coincidence that certain materials have explored that and explored modern society. It’s inevitable, isn’t it? Certain intelligent filmmakers are gonna inevitably get into that. The interesting thing is that we are all part of it, particularly in Hollywood. But then there’s an element of being in the creative industry where there’s somewhat less guilt associated because at least you can tackle stories and get things out into the world that need to be unpacked and told. There’s obviously incredible amounts of disparity in wealth all around the world — not just disparity in wealth, but also politically, societally. It’s interesting to get into that because it’s so complicated.
That question was probably tipping my hand too much, but that’s generally my favorite type of narrative to watch. I appreciated the overlaps there.
They’re different. I feel like this one isn’t as satirical. It feels more optimistic in some ways, it feels more dramatic in others. I think it’s important to have different versions of it where we get a little more hope and a little more comedy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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