From The Tourist series two to Belfast, the former male model is one of Hollywood’s hottest properties.
It’s dawn and I’m on a beach in Mexico with Jamie Dornan. There’s sand between my toes and the genetically blessed actor is purring in my ear: “The coastline sparkles, it appears translucent . . .” Then my baby resumes his screaming and I’m back in my London flat listening to the Mexican Beach episode of Sleep Sound with Jamie Dornan on Audible.
Eight long hours later I meet Dornan in real life. Not on a secluded beach, sadly, but in a windowless room in his publicist’s office. “I found it really calming,” he says of recording the sleep-aid podcast a few years ago. “I’ve got quite a lot of hyper energy and I really struggle to sit still.” Dornan’s wife, Amelia Warner, a composer, calls his hyper periods “shouty bangy time”. “I can have days where I have shouty bangy time the whole day. It’s often singing time too. It’s really irritating, I’m sure.”
Within minutes of meeting him it’s obvious that Dornan, 41, is a delight — and that his Northern Irish self-deprecation is fully intact despite his soaring career. Once upon a time he was the reluctant top model (Calvin Klein, Dior, Giorgio Armani) turned actor who played a serial-killer family man in The Fall and who triggered mass swooning and mass mockery as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey film trilogy. “The whole journey was quite an odd, out-of-body experience,” he says about the movies. Now he’s revered as one of Britain’s most exciting actors and there are rumours that he could be the next James Bond.
It’s a physically demanding role, with his character leaping out of moving vans, scrambling up mountains, brawling with hulking villains. “While I still feel relatively young, I really want to do that,” Dornan says. “I love throwing myself around. I’m a very frustrated sportsman.” He adds that he learns self-defence tactics while he rehearses the fight scenes. So if someone sprang in a dark alley, how would he fare? “I’d feel super-ready, but the reality is I’m an actor, I’d be like [cue a high-pitched whine], ‘Ahh, get off.’ "
In 2006, when he was in his early twenties, he was violently mugged in Jamaica. “It was absolutely horrific . . . this situation where I thought I was going to die,” he says, looking haunted at the memory. “I was a wee bit stoned because that’s what you do in Jamaica. It was late at night, it was very bad. I jumped out of a moving bus.” Reluctant to tell the full “mad story” he sketches out the details: his assailants held a gun against him through a jacket (he didn’t see it but it felt very much like a real gun) and they had a machete in full view.
“Lots of maniacal laughing and whispering the most terrifying things ever said to me,” he says. “It was a truly awful experience.”
It sounds like a scene straight out of The Tourist. He received rave reviews for his performance in the first series; I bring up one critic’s note that it “might be his best work yet”, but Dornan points out that the same person wrote of his performance in the BBC period drama Death and Nightingales in 2018: “To be fair to Dornan, he can’t act, but he does at least seem to realise this.” The line crushed him.
“Someone’s sending you good reviews, let me tell you, whether it’s an auntie or your publicist or whoever. No one is sending you all the bad ones . . . so you find yourself seeking them out,” he says. “I’ve had some of the worst shit ever said about me for a series of films but, for whatever reason, that [line] really, really affected me.” In recent years Dornan has shown his versatility: playing a father fighting for his family in the Oscar-winning film Belfast, a lovelorn dope in the wacky comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar and the real-life war photographer Paul Conroy in A Private War.
“I am now just in a place — and this might change by next week — that I accept that things are obviously good. I work all the time. I get a real choice over what I work on. I work with really high-profile, cool people with big companies who risk millions and millions of dollars building shows around my central character,” he says, without arrogance. “If I keep doing what I’m doing, it’s OK.” He makes no bones about admitting that he’s “hugely ambitious”. “I’ve always felt like I’m someone who has a point to prove or something. I think a lot of that comes from — Jesus, you could go well down a rabbit hole here — being quite small when I was a kid and always thinking I had to work harder to stand out on a rugby pitch. I’m very fuelled by a ‘F*** you, watch this’ sort of energy.”
Ever since he left home aged 20 to pursue a modelling career in London he has been determined to “make good things happen”. A father to three girls — Dulcie, ten, Elva, seven, and Alberta, four — he says that drive “ramps up tenfold with every kid”.
He grew up in the Belfast suburb of Holywood with two older sisters, his mum, Lorna, and his dad, Jim, a renowned gynaecologist and obstetrician. His mum died of pancreatic cancer when he was 16; his father died from Covid in 2021 while Dornan was stuck in quarantine in Australia. I try to ask about grief but begin crying. My mum died two months ago and I’m in the weepy stage, I explain. “I know that stage very well,” he says, his face crumpling with empathy.
He always talks about “Papa” and “Granny Lorna” with his children and has framed photos of them around his home. “Keeping the name and the spirit alive is really important, and then you start to see stuff of them in your children too,” he says. “It happens all the time.” Is that bittersweet? “It’s only sweet, I think. It becomes only sweet,” he says, starting to cry. “It’s a really uniquely beautiful thing to see your parents carried through two generations.”
Dornan knows grief horribly well — when he was 17, four of his friends died in a car crash — and he talks honestly about it in the hope that this might help others. “I got a lifetime’s worth of grief when I was at an age that was just too young,” he says. “But I also think lots of positive things about my character came out of that.” He’s resilient, for example, and generally doesn’t sweat the small stuff.
In 2022 he restarted psychotherapy. “You go for one thing and it becomes something totally different,” he says, laughing. “It’s like, ‘Why are we not talking about what I told you that’s wrong with me? Or maybe that’s not the thing that’s wrong with me?’”
Talk turns to his modelling years. Despite not winning the Channel 4 reality show Model Behaviour in 2001, he quickly became hugely successful, working on campaigns with the likes of Kate Moss, Gisele Bündchen and Eva Mendes. He didn’t enjoy becoming the “Golden Torso” (as The New York Times dubbed him in 2006) and he still doesn’t like having his photo taken. “But I look back at it with more pride now,” he says. “I probably had more embarrassment about it, especially when acting was kicking off in a bigger way and I was like, ‘No, f*** that, I am an actor now.’ "
His latest campaign for Loewe, shot by the fashion photographer David Sims (“a master”), whom Dornan worked with early in his modelling days, was a genuinely happy experience.
As a newbie model, though, he had some creepy interactions. Once, when he was aged about 20, he was being shot by an older photographer who was adamant that they should have lunch together afterwards. “I said no and got dressed, came out and he was naked in the kitchen making spaghetti bolognese,” Dornan says. “Appalling! Unless that’s just how he cooks? I ran out.”
On another occasion a photographer purposefully walked into Dornan’s changing room while he was undressing, acted like it was a mistake but then only half-closed the door and lingered outside.
“It’s just weird shit, now that I look back at it. Voyeuristic, strange, very uncomfortable stuff.”
When I ask about the obsession with his appearance, Dornan lets out a heavy sigh before reasoning that most actors deal with a focus on their looks. “We could get into a whole, mad body-dysmorphia conversation here,” he says. “I have tons of issues with how I look, just as every single person who looks in the mirror has tons of issues with the way they look.” What’s his biggest issue with his looks? “No,” he says, laughing. Name one issue? “No!”
He claims to be unbothered by the grey strands in his beard and ageing more generally. “Vanity is the thing I deplore most in people. Arrogance and vanity I despise,” he says. “I’m not a very confident person but I’m really impressed when I see very confident people own who they are.”
He is comfortable with his level of recognition, travels by public transport (“headphones are a great detractor of attention”) and avoids celebrity parties. “I feel for someone like Taylor Swift; it’s probably really hard to do anything normal,” he says. “I don’t have that problem. I wouldn’t want to be more famous than I am.”
He adds that for his psycho-killer role in The Fall (2013-16), he researched how to hide in plain sight. “It has been really helpful for me. I really do think I can blend in.”
When it comes to work, he has a solid group of actor friends to whom he can turn for advice. I persuade him to drop names. “I have a close circle: Andrew Garfield, Eddie Redmayne, Tom Sturridge, Rafe Spall, Charlie Cox.”
After the kink-fest of Fifty Shades, I wonder if he’s keen to avoid sex scenes these days. But he is still game. “Sex is a big part of life. If you’re telling people’s stories and the story is reflective of the life then the chances are there’s probably going to be sex in it.” The problem is getting the scenes right. “We’ve got to find a way of making them more interesting,” he says. “You don’t still need to be loitering around too much with it any more, do you? You don’t need to see some gratuitous shot of whatever; someone’s arse, someone’s tits. It doesn’t feel necessary and often it’s like, ‘Is this helping to tell the story? No.’ "
Dornan is in the middle of his longest stretch away from work (partly by choice, partly because of the Hollywood writers’ strike) and he is relishing spending more time with his wife of almost 11 years and their children. They bounce between homes in London, Portugal and west Ireland.
He lights up talking about his daughters — “I want to be someone they feel they can trust and say anything to” — and imagines that one day they will take artsy career avenues. “They seem to be very creative, cool, talented little people who are performers,” he says. “Perfect little nepo babies!”
Recently he “dragged” Redmayne round for Sunday lunch — roasts are a sacred weekly tradition chez Dornan. “I’m a nutty roast-potato person,” he says. “That’s comically Irish, to admit to being a potato master, but I really am.” The secret, apparently, is frequent turning and a final ten-minute blast at 220C.
It all sounds wonderfully un-Hollywood, but Dornan relishes the anything-can-happen vibes of Los Angeles. He remembers going out for martinis with a hotshot film producer one time and coming back to his wife, drunk on booze and big promises.
“He says he is going to build a world around me,” he recalls telling her. “She was like, ‘Shut up, listen to yourself.’ Anyway, he hasn’t built that world around me yet.” There’s still time.
The Tourist season 2 is available to stream on TVNZ+
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London