Playing men who tie up women in The Fall & Fifty Shades: “There are a couple of classic knots I know now, and I’ve put them to good use far too many times recently. In fact I’d like to do a job where I don’t have to tie women to beds.”
His natural, fidgety intensity: “A doctor once told me I have abnormal levels of adrenaline in my system…I’m tired. I’m tired,” he says, reflecting on a “mad year, professionally, personally”. At times his tiredness verges on delirium. At one point he rails against the practice of restaurants putting lemon slices in Coca-Cola, unsolicited (“You can’t deny it changes the flavour”). Then he catches himself and starts fretting that he sounds like a la-di-da Hollywood star.
His struggles to find work: “I never felt I was trying to prove anything apart from to myself. But I come at it from a funny angle. Although it looks like I’ve only been acting a few years, we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of failed auditions. I look back on it now and I don’t know how anyone gets through the rejection.”
Modeling and being “the golden torso”: “I was lucky. If I hadn’t been getting paid to model I definitely would have stopped. I would fly off, do a shoot here and there, get paid well, then go back to preparing – and failing – for auditions and meetings. I think I’ve done two shoots in my underwear ever. They both happened to be for Calvin Klein. But that tag – underwear model – I just can’t get rid of it. And it’s such a bizarre, specific thing – underwear. It’s like I never modelled clothes.” It didn’t help that someone – he thinks it might have been a fashion editor at American GQ – gave him a nick****, and it’s stuck. He says he is “haunted” by the moniker “the golden torso.”
On Fifty Shades: “The whole thing’s ridiculous.” Then he falls silent. “It’s just all a bit silly the way it works. I think I could lose my mind.” By contrast, coming back from Fifty, as he calls it, straight on to The Fall and Belfast, “felt like coming home, in the loveliest way”.
His future: “Right now I don’t need to work if there’s nothing that I want to do. I’ve done three jobs back to back. Let’s see how they are received. If there’s nothing I want to do, I’ll just play golf and change nappies.”
Cele|bitchy | Jamie Dornan: ‘I’d like to do a job where I don’t have to tie women to beds’