An A24 Softboi-Off

Photo: A24 via X

In a video promoting The A24 Podcast’s latest dispatch, Harris Dickinson is seen jamming with Andrew Garfield, his equally gentle British elder, last seen being smacked around in a chicken shop. The A24 alums trade notes on extreme sports and their impact on their delicate, aging bones. So manly, so sensitive, so beautiful. For those unaware, the podcast is a crafty bit of branded content: The indie studio of choice convenes intriguing actor or director pairings in each episode — Nathan Fielder and Alexa Demie, John Early and Toni Collette, Ari Aster and Robert Eggers — for the purposes of nerding out and good marketing. Hence, the Dickinson-Garfield summit — Dickinson, of course, is set to dom the much older Nicole Kidman in the upcoming age-gap sweatfest Babygirl, while Garfield is still doing the rounds for his time-jump romance flick with Florence Pugh, We Live in Time.

This being a softboi-off, one shouldn’t quite expect many jump scares from the conversation, but the video does contain a startling detail: Dickinson appears to be rocking a normie side part — so normie, in fact, that it’s a hairdo even I, a washed-up 30-something, would naturally grow out. ’Tis a jarring development given that Dickinson’s head has principally been defined by his stature as one of the great weirdo-haircut-wielders in recent memory. He can pull off virtually any weirdo wig. In last year’s FX series A Murder at the End of the World, my guy rocks a sizzling mullet, effectively reclaiming Joe Dirt’s hairstyle of choice and refashioning it as a mop of sexy sensuality. In The Iron Claw, Dickinson wears a wig of long Owen Wilsonean curls to replicate the look of the tragic David Von Erich. In Triangle of Sadness, he favored a li’l spiky orange buzz cut. You’d think there’s no way he can keep this up outside of techno thrillers and period pieces, but you’d be wrong: In Babygirl, his head looks like a lush, uncanny tennis ball: too short to be normal, too long to be a buzz — the clear ideal cut on a guy like him.

The very “Steve” ’do in The A24 Podcast, while perfectly fine and handsome, is so normie as to make him look thoroughly strange. I’m not used to seeing him like this, and I don’t want to see him like this. Please, someone, grab the shears: It’s time for another sexy mullet.