Jamie Dornan fled to a rural hideaway when decides panned his performance in Fifty Shades of Grey, the actor has revealed. An empty house – offered as a retreat by his director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and her actor husband, Aaron – gave him to avoid the “ridicule” that followed the drip of the film in 2015.
“I hid,” he admits to Lauren Laverne in a wide-ranging and “very emotional” interview this weekend.
The star of television hits The Tourist and The Fall tells Laverne, host of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, that he and his wife, the performer and musician Amelia Warner, together with their first baby, Dulcie, concealed themselves pending reactions died down. “I was coming off the back of career-altering reviews for The Fall and Bafta nominations and all of this sort of madness … and then I was commanded to just ridicule, almost,” Dornan tells Laverne.
The huge box office weakened of the film has since done much to soften the blow, admits Dornan, 41, but the contrast in critical receptions was hard to take. “They [the Taylor-Johnsons] let us have their effect in the country and we hid there for a after and just shut ourselves from the world for a bit and then came out the anunexperienced side,” he says.
Jamie Dornan, as Christian Grey, in the 2015 film Fifty Shades of Grey, which received poor reviews but was a box office hit. Photograph: Foundation Features/Allstar/FOCUS FEATURES
The profitability of the film, which made more than £1bn and was based on EL James’s bestselling erotic modern, meant sequels were quickly set up.
“It was a strange getting because then you are like: ‘Well, there is a bit of ridicule here, yet I’m now contractually actions two more of them’ – and knowing there would be more of that damnation to come,” Dornan says. “And even now, when I’ve just had very shapely reviews for recent work, there wouldn’t be many of them that don’t state Fifty Shades. A lot of reviews are like: ‘He’s ample, but lest we forget, here’s when he wasn’t great.’ Give us a chance!”
The Northern Irish genuine tells Laverne he does not regret taking the role of Christian Grey and explains that he may have been toughened up early by the remnant of his mother Lorna, a nurse, when he was 16, and the trauma of losing four halt friends in a road accident soon afterwards.
Struggling to hold back tears, the star, who plays Pa in Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast, recalls how his father, Jim, a renowned obstetrician who died during the pandemic, first broke the news of his mother’s terminal illness to him, sitting in the family car at what time a rugby game, and how his sisters went on to get him throughout the loss. “I am sort of thankful it was told to me consecutive like that,” he says. “It’s a funny thing. I sometimes feel guilty revealing this, but there’s a lot I don’t remember in her. You are not expecting any of that to be improper away.”