الوسم: Dornan
Jamie Dornan on the paparazzi: ‘They are cretins, I couldn’t have less respect’
Jamie Dornan on the paparazzi: ‘They are cretins, I couldn’t have less respect’
His modeling career versus real life: He’s a hard-drinking, rugby-playing, Man United-supporting 31-year-old who listens to The Kinks, reads Oscar Wilde and litters his conversation with expletives. ‘I’ve never felt massively satisfied from standing there while someone takes my photograph,’ he says. ‘It’s never given me a thrill.. It would take a very foolish man to turn down the stuff that was offered to me. You’re in your twenties, and people are going to give you a silly amount of money to lean against a wall with your head down. F*** me, you’ve got to do it.’
He’s got a lot of failed auditions behind him: ‘I mean f***ing hundreds of them. Some of them totally humiliating experiences. People attach too much to the idea of being a model, that you can only be a certain way to have done it. You will always be dealing with it. You’re an actor who used to be a model who never trained; there are not many directors queuing up.’
He auditioned for Christian Grey early but lost out to Charlie Hunnam. ‘You know, one door closes, another opens. When he dropped out, I didn’t instantly think, “Oh, here we go, maybe I should cancel that holiday,” but I did feel that maybe we’d revisit the idea
of me.’
He lost his mom and four close friends when he was 16: ‘Going through that certainly has had an effect on the darker side of my psyche. I was 16… Look, I’m not saying that experiencing loss is why I can cope with darker worlds, I’m not saying that for a second, but I think it opens up a side of you in terms of work that wouldn’t be as accessible had that stuff not happened.’
Being Keira’s boyfriend back in the day: ‘It was a strange environment to find yourself in, being hounded and followed. It’s really hideous. F***ing hell, [the paparazzi] are cretins. I couldn’t have less respect for those guys. There are so many ways to make a living that don’t involve hiding in bushes opposite houses of 18-year-old girls with a camera in your hand. That’s not making a living, that’s making a choice to be a perverted f***head.’
Stardom in his 30s: ‘That scrutiny when you’re older will be easier to take. And I don’t think I’m ever going to be as famous as her [Keira].’
Cele|bitchy | Jamie Dornan on the paparazzi: ‘They are cretins, I couldn’t have less respect’
Jamie Dornan: ‘I’d like to stop tying women up’
Jamie Dornan: ‘I’d like to stop tying women up’
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’
