Jamie Dornan on The Tourist and his Fifty Shades stalker: ‘They turned up at my house when my kids were there’
Jamie Dornan, Kenneth Branagh once said, is far too interesting a person for someone so pretty. That was the gist, anyway. “He surprises you as being something more intriguing than his exceptional good looks,” were his exact words, right around the time he directed him in Belfast, the 2021 Oscar winner that helped transition Dornan out of his vaguely unhelpful status as “the guy from Fifty Shades of Grey”. When I repeat Branagh’s words back to Dornan over Diet Cokes at a publicity office in central London, I’m taken aback by the sincerity of his response. Dornan doesn’t blush or cringe. He doesn’t scold me for embarrassing him. He just sits there, touched, as if it’s the nicest sentiment he’s heard in years.
“Oh man, I f***ing need to hear s*** like that,” he tells me, rubbing gently at his salt-and-pepper beard. “Sometimes I’m just riddled with self-f***ing-hatred and doubt. It’s very, very nice to hear that.” Branagh, he says, has always treated him like an equal. “The first time I met him, to discuss Belfast, I don’t think there was a job I’d done that he hadn’t seen. He’d seen s*** that I didn’t think anyone had ever heard of, let alone been released. He’d really done his f***ing research on me.”
Dornan is 41, Irish and sweary, that mellifluous brogue of his at odds with the sheer volume of f-bombs. He has been famous for more than a decade –. Underpants, Calvin Klein, the lot. There’s strike one. Then, in 2013, he starred opposite Gillian Anderson in BBC One’s , lending menace and subtlety to the role of a father-of-two who moonlights as a serial killer. Everyone, though, still really fancied him. It was weird. And then a couple of years later he was Christian Grey, the freak-in-the-sheets, unrelenting-bore-in-the-streets hero of a franchise of maligned bonkbusters adapted from a series of terrible books. It was a poisoned chalice of sorts, so no wonder he has a bit of a complex. Then again, it started early.
