Jamie Dornan moves through the frame. Specifically, the window frame of a little Japanese restaurant in Stroud, a town in the west of England once famed for its wool mills, meandering rivers and suspiciously photogenic sheep. It’s not so much sleepy as comatose. There’s a shop selling energy crystals and a vintage clothing store called Time After Time. It’s twee.
No one looks like they are in a hurry, least of all the man I’m meeting. The actor, as handsome as your wife thinks he is, is walking tall, giving me the double guns: one arm outstretched, the other bent like an archer’s, as both hands and index fingers point through the restaurant glass. Pew! Pew! It’s very Trinity taking aim in The Matrix, but, you know, more dad.
Yet, even if I didn’t know Dornan a smidgen already – we met 16 years ago, both as rookies in our respective games, both wearing stonewashed denim and white Calvin Kleins, one of us far more successfully than the other – I would vouch that he’d serve up this type of welcome.
Through the door he strides, delivering a big, enveloping bear hug, a pat on the back, million-dollar grin, shoulder shake and a hearty, knowing chuckle. He’s the long-lost best pal returning from a foreign jaunt whom I never knew I’d missed so much, the boy next door with the doll eyes who gave up rugby, got a big break and ran with it all the way to a lottery-win career.
The boy’s golden. Although his isn’t a twinkly, untouchable sheen – the sort Timothée Chalamet has while gliding around Cannes like a fashion stormtrooper in a Haider Ackermann bodysuit – so much as a visible, exothermic heat. Remember the “Ready Brek” man from the adverts as a kid? No? He was a stop-motion plasticine avatar who glowed like a commemorative Chernobyl ashtray once he’d had his branded porridge. Well, that’s Dornan. He has serious warmth: you can see his central heating on the outside.
Today, the 39-year-old Northern Irish actor is dressed precisely as a leading man should dress for a casual, early autumnal Monday appointment with a member of the press: a loose T-shirt the colour of a white sheet that’s been on a warm rinse cycle with a teabag; non-fashion sneakers; beige khaki trousers tight enough to make his noticeably toned Peloton calves resemble a couple of pythons who have both swallowed tennis balls. He’s also sporting a perfectly (genuinely) distressed cobalt-blue chore jacket, plus a battered navy baseball cap, something he’ll turn and wear backwards – backwards! – once our bowls of spicy chicken noodle soup arrive. It’s a look few near-40-year-old fathers could get away with outside of their own home gyms: think more Dalston barista by way of a Mayfair gallerist who specialises in unboxed Pokémon NFTs.
“You like ramen and stuff?” he asks me as we sit. We were due to meet up in London and have a walk around Hyde Park, but looking at the forecast yesterday I thought it somewhat drier to take a train ride and go for a bite on his turf. “To be honest with you, this is fairly new, this place. The news that Stroud was to get a Japanese restaurant… well, it caused quite a buzz, let me tell you.”
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Jacket, £545 .T-shirt, £45 and Trousers, £45. All by Boss. hugoboss.com Andrew Woffinden
Dornan, his wife, composer Amelia Warner, and their three daughters (all aged under ten) have lived a short drive from Stroud for several years. “It was after finishing the Fifty Shades films, really. We just had a desire to get out of the city entirely. We had a small place down the road in the Cotswolds, but upscaled. We still have a place in London and get decent use out of it. The move was for the kids, really. You don’t notice the traffic or the poor air quality in London when you’re there, but you notice its absence once out. Also, have you seen how many fucking apps you need to park in London?”
Property, air pollution, parking apps: this is peak dad chat. We’ll be talking kombucha scobies next. But he’s like that: convivial, homely, humble. No movie star enclave with high walls and security dogs for Dornan; he’s a proud, accessible member of this rural community. When he and his wife first moved in, handwritten notes were dropped through their letterbox inviting them to dinners, drinks, coffee evenings.
It feels like a world Richard Osman would conjure, but for Dornan it’s more genuine, more him, than trying to endlessly keep up with the Joneses in the big smoke. As for the neighbourly invites, he accepted, gladly.
“Something told us that the previous owners weren’t so into it. We embraced it.” In fact, Dornan has gone so far as to set up a local dads’ football team. “I thought I was easily as fit as the other fathers, but we came back from Australia about two months ago, having been there for five, six months, and both my knees totally went in the first few minutes.”
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Dornan was recently in Australia shooting The Tourist, a BBC/HBO series that seems to be a cross between Steven Spielberg’s Duel and Christopher Nolan’s Memento – it’s getting some decent buzz. This wasn’t his last foreign trip, however, as last night he landed back in Britain from Portugal.
“Not work, actually, no. Me and my wife were able to squeeze in three nights without the kids – something we do every year, which is a life-saver. Though I was on the beach yesterday and only left myself 20 minutes to do all the Covid stuff: passenger locator forms, printing out the vaccine passports and so on. It was the most stressful thing I’ve ever been through. I ended up having to skip the shower and, with no clean underwear on, I went commando on the plane all the way home. Don’t worry, I’ve washed now, although I’ve still got salt in my hair.”
Dornan raced home to talk to me about, for one thing, his latest film, Belfast, recently postponed to come out at the beginning of next year. Written and directed by national treasure Kenneth Branagh, the movie is a semiautobiographical look back at the director’s time growing up in Northern Ireland as a young boy.
The film’s story begins on 15 August 1969, weeks after the moon landing and the very day the Irish capital’s riots reached Branagh’s terrace house. The cinematic reverie is whimsical, almost glamorous compared to many other films made about this era in Irish history; shot in rich black and white, Branagh’s megawatt, emotive storytelling skills are switched to full power here, letting us consider this period of history from a fresh, very personal perspective.
If you didn’t know Branagh was Irish, join the queue: he left the country aged nine and moved to Reading, England, thus avoiding the worst of the Troubles. Yet, during the pandemic last year, when so many of us were locked in our houses, unable to see family members, Branagh found himself thinking about his roots and the prism through which we all define “home”.
Dornan plays “Pa”, the father of Buddy, the guide and the young boy wrestling with the violent religious divide that is, quite literally, tearing up his street. (The paving stones were used for missiles and barricades, leaving local residents to walk on the sand and gravel underlay.)
Dornan quietly, yet compellingly, fills the part, a role that requires the actor to keep his emotions dialled back and to have all the deep-rooted masculine traits of a late-1960s Irish labourer – stoic, tough, silent, yet almost mythically heroic in the eyes of his young son. Pa’s diligence and levelheadedness is used as a counter – the voice of reason, if you like – against Buddy’s terror, confusion and wide-eyed innocence amid the unfolding chaos.
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Coat, £3,400. Jumper, £570. Trousers, £520. All by Fendi, fendi.com Andrew Woffinden
“I hadn’t met him before,” explains Branagh when I ask him to explain why he asked Dornan to play the part, “but I thought he was a really natural leading man. He is not interested in those usual ticks that can make up so many colourful, eye-catching parts. I particularly liked him in the much undervalued movie Anthropoid; he has a compelling way in repose, in which he thinks and reflects. Sometimes acting is about a trick of physiognomy, but mostly it’s about bringing your interior life to the camera.
“There is a line when Jamie, as Pa, is at the wake of his father, who has died, and he explains to Buddy that his grandfather was ‘a very deep thinker’. And I always felt that was true of Jamie too. He surprises you as being something more intriguing than his exceptional good looks. He was my first and only choice for the role.
“That quality of being interesting while silent – this chimed with what we needed from our Belfast man, the non-caring and sharing type. He’s tough, yes, sporty, yes, charming, yes, but he also embraces his vulnerability or can sit with it happily. He’s happy to peel the layers and get uncomfortable for a performance. He walks towards that fear. That’s unusual.”
‘My dad was such a beacon of positivity in my life, such good energy to be around. I hope to carry that on’
Branagh, perhaps unsurprisingly, is an excellent observationalist. As I talk to Dornan, it’s clear: this man is not closed off. He’s not rigid in his thinking or his opinions. He has a genuine curiosity, about film and the industry, sure, but also about fatherhood, fame and Britain’s petrol shortages. The actor enjoys chewing on opinion, especially his own. There’s a positive question mark in the way he looks at the world, one feels.
It’s what Branagh sees when he describes Dornan as reflective: “Oh, Jamie can be the life and soul of a party,” the director continues, “but often during filming he was very comfortable at a distance. He’s independent in this way. It’s why he’s so good at golf, probably: great focus and concentration. There’s a famous remark made by Irish film icon James Cagney’s great friend Pat O’Brien. He said, ‘Yeah, James is a lovely guy, but he’s a faraway fella.’ There’s something about Jamie that is a very charismatic, faraway fella. As a director and as a viewer, this draws people towards him.”
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There’s no doubt Dornan carries weight within. Something we touch on a couple of times during our conversation is the tragic death of both his parents: his mother when he was only 16 and his father, a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, much more recently. “I lost my father last year to Covid,” he explains. “He was such a beacon of positivity in my life, such good energy to be around, [and] I hope to carry that on. But his death was pretty brutal. I was in quarantine in a hotel in Sydney with my whole family, with still three days of quarantine [left on] the day he died, not able to leave this fucking room. And I hadn’t seen him since Christmas 2019, like so many people… Fucking dreadful. But he impacted so much on us when Mum died, about not being defined by a loss like that; wearing it at all times and honouring it and respecting it, but not to let that be the first thing people think of you. But now he’s gone, what can you do but kick on?”
Tragic as this is, Dornan knows how proud his father was of his journey. “He used to tell me all the time. You have scenes in films where the dad hasn’t said the right thing at the end of his life to his son, but my dad would gift us endless praise. I feel very lucky to have had that, despite losing him.” It was the loss of his mother, in fact, that indirectly enabled Dornan to step outside of his comfort zone and try to become a model.
“I’d left university, I was 19, and that summer I was just doing nothing, apart from drinking very aggressively all day in Belfast,” he explains. “My family were worried about me being so directionless, I think, so my sister put me up for this TV show, Model Behaviour, where you could win a modelling contract with Select and go on the cover of GQ. I was like, ‘To be a model? Fuck off!’ But she twisted my arm and I dragged my mate along. So I went begrudgingly, but that was my foot in the door, the window through which everything else followed. I didn’t win. But then I took myself to London and turned up, unsolicited, at Select’s offices and got signed. And here I am 19 years later finally on the cover of GQ. What took you so long?”
So, ignore those puppy dog eyes: there is a punchy ambition that sits within Dornan. “Aged 21, I was doing some big, big campaigns – they were a huge deal – earning good money, but because I never really saw modelling as a career I guess I didn’t let it get to me too much.” How did it feel being called “The Golden Torso” by the New York Times or the “male Kate Moss”, as he was dubbed back then? “I still don’t know what I’m supposed to think about that! It’s a different industry for women; you can’t be the male Kate Moss. It’s the one industry where men earn significantly less than women.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Dornan has always been slightly ashamed of having been a male model. “I didn’t love it,” he admits, quietly. “And I still don’t like having my photograph taken. I find it odd. I find it an unnatural thing to happen. It’s not fun to be told continually to move your head about like it is on a swivel. ‘Chin up. Chin down…’ I do consider myself lucky, though.” In what way? “Well, I never had to do a fashion show. I couldn’t handle other male models, that hyper energy.” What was it about them? “Well, I don’t know… I mean, what’s the collective noun for a bunch of male models? But I struggled with, let’s say, the energy. There’s too much vanity and it just feels douche-y as fuck. Too much nonsense. Whenever I went on a date or met a girl in a pub or whatever, I’d say I was a landscape gardener or worked for Google – anything but admit to having my photograph taken for a living.”
I get it, no one wants to be the sort of guy who admits to being really good looking. “Look, I do think it helped me get comfortable, or uncomfortable, around a camera,” he admits.
Dornan’s depth has been much in demand before now. It’s no doubt what contributed towards the star being offered numerous roles, not least that of Christian Grey in the adaptation of EL James’ book Fifty Shades Of Grey.
I wonder how the actor now looks back on that transformative bonk-buster experience? Before he was announced as the lead, Dornan’s career was well on the way, having won over audiences and critics alike with his role as serial killer Paul Spector in the BBC drama series The Fall. Did he feel that taking such a divisive part as Grey could be a risk? Did he worry its reception would somehow derail his reputation?
“There has to be an acceptance with acting, taking jobs, that you don’t ultimately have control over some things,” Dornan explains. “But you do know what you are getting into and I did spend a lot of time weighing up whether to take the Fifty Shades role. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised; sometimes you can be bitterly disappointed. Take that project [and] you know that loads of people are going to hate it – hate it – before they have even seen it. Why? Because, guess what? The majority of people hated the books. And I’m not saying I don’t recognise why those books were so powerful for millions of people, but you aren’t going to have books that were horrifically critiqued turned into movies that will be critically acclaimed. You are dealing with the same material. That’s the raw material we had.”
So Dornan knew the score before the reviews landed? “Oh, yes. I walked in knowing that. But nevertheless, it was a massive opportunity.” An opportunity for what? Fame? Money? Some sort of self-flagellating artistic experiment? “I’ll never forget, the Guardian did this long piece on Fifty Shades – it was just after The Fall came out and I had been nominated for a Bafta, a huge moment in my career – about my announcement and about what a devastating career choice it was for me. So the early consensus of my ‘bad choice’, let’s just say, I was very aware of that narrative.”
