New Interview of Jamie with Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair - In Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Dornan mastered the art of performing B.D.S.M. sex. For his latest film, Anthropoid, the Irish actor had a very different set of challenges: he had to learn how to speak with a Czech accent and how to wield a gun in order to portray real-life hero Jan Kubis, a Czechoslovakian resistance fighter who in 1942 helped assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Having conquered such daunting tasks as an actor can accomplish onscreen, what was the most taxing skill for Dornan to accomplish?

“They all present their own challenges. Sex scenes are hard because you’re simulating sex, and that’s a very strange way to spend the day,” Dornan, 34, told Vanity Fair at the film’s red-carpet premiere in New York on Thursday night. “It’s physically challenging to do a movie like Anthropoid. It was a grueling shoot. It was very long days and it was hot. It was the middle of the summer in Prague. We ran around with guns and wore a lot of clothes. It’s a part of the job, but that takes its toll. This was the one time I wish I wasn’t wearing so much clothes.” 

On the topic of disrobing: many fans were disappointed that the 2015 adaptation of E.L. James’s popular novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which starred Dornan as Christian Grey, did not show the actor fully nude. In the film, he only revealed his buttocks while his co-star Dakota Johnson, 26, completely shed all of her clothes. It’s just another example of a woman getting naked onscreen while her male counterpart remains mostly clothed. Johnson discussed the scene on Bravo’s talk show, Watch What Happens Live, last February, agreeing that it was unfair for moviegoers to see so much of her and comparatively little of Dornan. She even joked about wanting to start a campaign to see Dornan go “fully naked” for the film’s upcoming sequel, Fifty Shades Darker. Emilia Clarke, from [Game of Thrones, has also been vocal about the nudity imbalance: She’s had to film multiple nude scenes for the HBO series and believes it should be the same for the male actors.

Dornan, too, recognizes there is an inequality at play.

“I do think it’s unfair. I understand why women have an issue with that," he said. "I know it’s something that a lot of people have opinion on. But there’s plenty of male genitalia on show. Orlando Bloom did it today without even needing to. But I understand why. There’s more of an active taste for women to take their clothes off and be seen as a sex object. That can be gratuitous and I don’t agree with that.”

Dornan added that he too has felt sexualized, saying: “I feel very subjective a lot of the time at work. So I wouldn’t say I’m relatively not objectified in the work place. I am. It’s not just the women, but men too.”

Now that Fifty Shades Darker will be released next February, will viewers finally get to see Christian Grey completely slip off his clothes and go full frontal?

“I can’t even remember,” Dornan said with a smile. “It was so long ago. Two weeks ago we finished.”