Jamie in Total Magazine (October 2016) - New Interview + New Still from 'The Fall' Season 3

HQ Scans

Transcript

MAN OF STEELE

Former underwear model turned TV psycho and cinematic sex symbol, Jamie Dornan doesn't want to be pigeon-holed as Anastasia Steele's hunk. As The Fall returns and Christian Grey goes Fifty Shades Darker, Total Film catches up with an ambitious actor with a busy slate, determined to break out of his sex symbol stereotype.

With his granite features, immaculate suits and buttoned-up emotions, Christian Grey really is Fifty Shades of Grey... at least until he gets into his red room of pain and lets it all hang out. Jamie Dornan, the 34 year old model turned actor who rocketed from Hollywood to play him, makes for a rather more colourful encounter. He is, in short, not at all you expect.

"Someone's just told me I've come runner-up to Tom Hiddleston in 'rear of the year'," he shares, genuinely perplexed (as are we - he should have been number one). "I don't think, as an actor, you set out to achieve that. Truth be told, I pay no fucking notice."

But surely it meant something, in the heyday o modelling for Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss and Armani, to be labelled 'The Golden Torso' by The NewYork Times? "I never had a big plan to do modelling," he shrugs. "I got coerced into it. I never fully committed and my attitude was a big shit. I was always trying to do the acting thing. But I didn't get training. Some of my least favorite actors - boring, predictable - went to RADA and shit. Acting is instinctual." He grins. "Though you'd never see me trying to do Shakespeare anywhere near Stratford because I'm not trained and I'd make a fucking idiot out of myself."

Relaxed, strikingly down to earth and, to put it mildly, garrulous, Dornan delivers such vivid comments damn near every time he opens mouth. "I didn't ask Kim Basinger about 9 1/2 Weeks," he admits when quizzed about teaming up the '80s steam queen on supersequel Fifty Shades Darker.

"I didn't have big enough balls, in the way that maybe someone won't be able to look me in the eye one day and talk about Fifty Shades."

Total Film is looking Dornan in the eye, sort of. Today's chat is happening via Skype. He's sitting in the living room of his rustic house in south-east England, dressed down in a navy blue t-shirt and trying to maintain equilibrium when his two year old daughter wanders into the room naked and starts hammering on the piano. At TF's end, events take an alarming turn when the dog humps the beanbag. There is no time for distractions, however: Dornan has a raft of fascinating projects to tell us about.

First up, released within a week of each other at the start of September, are Anthropoid and The 9th Life of Louis Drax. The former is true-life tale of the daring WW2 mission to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich, third in command of the Third Reich and prime archiect of the Final Solution. Sean Ellis' follow up to his award winning 2013 crime drama Metro Manila, it sees Dornan and Cillian Murphy play, respectively, the Slovakian and Czech soldiers charged with completing the kamikaze mission. The 9th Life of Louis Drax, meanwhile, is a mystery-thriller based on the bestseller by Liz Jensen and directed by Alexandre Aja (Switchblade Romance, Horns). It gifts Dornan the lead role of a comatose boy's doctor who's determined to find out the truth circumstances of the child's 'accidest' -  a quest that takes bizarre turns when reality bleeds into fantasy in a manner not dissimilar to Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labrinth.

"I'd just seen Metro Manilla before I got sent the script, so it felt like this serendipitous thing," Dornan says of Anthropoid. "I was banging on to my wife about how nuch I'd love work with Sean Ellis. To be honest, it could have been a short film about a man waiting for a number 52 bus. But I do like idea of playing people that actually existed. Fifty Shades is fantasy, fictional, out there..." He laughs, rubs his jaw. "I feel like I want to do real stuff. The guy I played in Marie Antoinette was real but he died years and years ago." Another laugh. "I loved this story. I thought it could touch people. Human characters with human flaws. I was very excited to play someone vulnerable. I'm used to playing people who are controlling."

And Drax? "I'd never read anything like it. Clever and unique. I did think we would have a task on our hands in terms of how to marry the supernatural aspect of it with the straight story. For me, it's again a total depature from anything I've done. And that's what I want to do keep playing characters that are different."

There are exceptions, of course. One of these is Christian Grey, who Dornan last week finished portraying in sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, shot back to back. The other is the role that accelerated his acting career: serial killer Paul Spector in BBC2's riveting cat and mouse crime series The Fall.

"I knew it was great, based on the scripts," he says. "I had never been up for anything like that. And I'd never had someone see that in me, that I could play menace or darkness. If you come from modelling, you only get offered certain jobs... boyfriend... you know, the usual shit." He pauses. "I actually auditioned for another part. For a policeman. Whatever I did, I convinced them I was a psycopath."

For two series now, Spector - counsellor, family man, slayer of young women - has tormented the coolly charismatic DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson). The finale of Season 2 suggested that their dance of death was over (no spoilers here). Then came the announcement that both would return in Season 3...

"There's a twisty element to it that you will not see coming," Dornan promises, his word finally slowing as he chooses them carefully. "It's certainly... a very interesting place to take it. I mean, I couldn't believe it when Allan Cubitt, who created it, told me what happens with my character. That's all I can really say."

Fine - he's clearly uncomfortable saying even one word more. But let's just make him really squirm before moving on the Fifty Shades movies: how does it feel to have so many viewers find the character that he describes as a 'sick, sick man' so very, very hot?

The biggest laugh yet. "It says more about them, doesn't it? Fuck, I don't know what to say about really. Look, if he has the effect on people, I would hope that comes more from us trying to give him some kind of charm and making him someone who is relatable, fancy-able, who could live next door to you, who could be your bereavement counsellor, which is all in the story, I hope, I hope." He takes a breath, shudders, and then adds, rather worryingly, "He's the one character I find hard to shake off."

Still, Dornan insists you have to be fearless about full-heartedly embracing such challenging or risque material as The Fall and Fifty Shades. The first Fifty Shades introduced billionaire Christian Grey as he demonstrated his kinks to virginal student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), making her blush at both ends. It failed to satisfy reviewers but went all the way at the box office, taking $571m. Fifty Shades Darker is set to penetrate deeper.

"It opens doors in terms of getting a better understanding of why he is the way he is, and why he feels the need to control. But we also get to see more of what the books would say is a 'vanilla relationship'. We get to see more of him and Ana having a regular existence, a relationship. But then things happen along the way to test that..."

One of the things that happens is that Christian's business partner, Elena Lincoln (Basinger), enters the picture - as readers of E.L. James' trilogy of bestselling books will know, she is the older woman who first introduced Master Grey to the pleasures (and pains) of BDSM. But there are key changes behind the camera, too: James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, Fear) took over the directorial reins from Sam Taylor-Johnson, who didn't have the smoothest of relationships with E.L. James; and the screenplay was this time penned by James' husband, Niall Leonard (TV shows Wild At Heart and Wire In The Blood). Is it fair to say that the author, like her male protagonist, is something of a control freak?

"These are Erika's babies," Dornan says. "She's very right to have a strong opinion on all Fifty Shades. But Erika and James Foley have a good relationship. They get on very well. He brings a different energy. He's going to put his own stamp on it."

With all this work (there's also Netflix premiere Jadotville, about 155 Irish troops who were besieged by thousands of French, Belgian and Rhodesian mercenaries in the Congo in 1961), you have to wonder if he ever gets a second himself. The answer is no, but mainly because he has two young children with his English actress/musician wife, Amelia Warner.

"I have the quietest family life," he says. "My wife and I were watching a movie last night. We got the kids to bed  and I had a glass of red wine in my hand. I was like, 'Fuck, I don't even think I can finish this. What's the time?' It was 8.30. I was like, 'It's too early to go to bed?' She was like, 'We can't go to bed before nine.' We just about scraped it. I was holding my eyelids open."

Jamie Dornan: sex symbol, leading man, tucked up asleep by 9pm. Like we said - not at all what you'd expect.    

Thanks to @Gossipgyal for the scans

New Video Interview of Jamie with Xposé - 'Anthropoid' Press Junket

Source | Edited version via Jamie Dornan BR

New Video Interview of Jamie with Associated Press - 'The 9th Life of Louis Drax' Press Junket

New Interview of Jamie with People

People - CATCHING UP JAMIE DORNAN

You star in the new World War II thriller Anthropoid, about the assassination of a high-level Nazi. Do you consider yourself to be a history buff?

Jamie: I would say no to that! My general history of WWII was sketchy in and of itself. I wasn't the most tuned-in student in history class. But the nice thing about a ture story is that there's plenty of research out there - it was easy to find out information about the operation once I got the job. And I wanted to be as well informed as I possibly could be.
 
You just finished filming the final two 50 Shades movies. What will you miss the most - and least - about them?

Jamie: I'll miss my friends the most. The people are like family to me, and suddenly I won't be seeing them as much, and that's kind of sad. But I won't miss wearing suits, which I had to do. I don't feel comfortable in them.

What do you do in your downtime? 

Jamie: When I get home from set I usually have a drink! I'm normally so exhausted that a drink is ver much needed at the end of the day. And I'm a big golfer. A lot people don't think it's cool or whatever, but I've grown up playing it. I've spent a large portion of my life defending golf!

Transcripted by us 

New Interview of Jamie and Cillian Murphy with THR

In Anthropoid, Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy play a pair of Czech operatives on a mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust and the leader of Nazi forces in Czechoslovakia.

Although they're a team onscreen in the Bleecker Street release based on true events that hits theaters today, Dornan and Murphy didn't spend a lot of time together before filming to try to cultivate a close bond. But it seemed clear in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the film's release that a friendship has developed between the two.

As he talked about being a fan of Murphy's work, Dornan slipped in a subtle dig at his slightly older co-star, saying with a straight face, "Obviously he's a great deal older than me, so I've sort of grew up watching Cillian's work." Murphy immediately began laughing at Dornan's playful ribbing.

Apart from expressing their mutual admiration for one another, Dornan and Murphy talked about the research they did to play Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, respectively, relying largely on the 15 years of research writer-director Sean Ellis said he put into the project before filming began.

Murphy, well-known for his roles in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, where he played the Scarecrow (he hasn't seen Zack Snyder's Batman v. Superman, he said) and Inception, is reteaming with Nolan for another World War II film, Dunkirk, which will be released next summer.

For Dornan, Anthropoid is a rare onscreen departure from his role as Christian Grey in Universal's ongoing Fifty Shades trilogy.

Dornan revealed that he felt significantly less pressure making the second and third films in a trilogy that launched with more than $570 million at the box office, adding that he thinks some of that initial anxiety may have crept into the first film. He also opened up about being in Nice during the Bastille Day terror attack and the struggle of returning to work the next day.

Writer-director Sean Ellis spent many years researching this part of history before filming began. What sort of research did you do to prepare for your roles?

Cillian Murphy: [We were very lucky that Sean researched the film for many years.] We sort of piggybacked on his knowledge, and he gave us a lot of materials, which we read. For me, the greatest resource was actually shooting the film in Prague. We were able to shoot in a lot of the locations where the mission actually happened and these guys existed, so that was kind of very affecting. We had a Czech crew and a lot of Czech actors. There's a great deal of authenticity to the project, and Sean was very anxious that that was the case from the beginning. You do your due diligence, you read as much as you can, and then, ultimately, I find that you discard that and you concentrate on the characters and you can draw on [the research] if you wish, but I think ultimately it's about bringing as much truth and honesty to the portrayal as possible.

Jamie Dornan: You're in a very nice position as an actor when you're portraying a piece of history that actually happened and portraying characters that actually existed. There's so much more to draw on and your research as an actor becomes much easier than if it's some fiction that you're trying to create a world around and background and history. When it's actually happened, that makes it much easier. There's plenty of information out there — books, online — about this part of history that research was very easy to come by.

New Interview of Jamie with Associated Press

AP - Don't look for Jamie Dornan on social media. He's had it.

Specifically, he's had it with hate-mongering trolls he's encountered despite a hyper fan base for "Fifty Shades" and "The Fall."

"To be honest, I was very inactive on it in the last year," he said during a recent round of interviews for two upcoming films, "Anthropoid" and "The 9th Life of Louis Drax."

"To delete my Instagram ... I had to email my publicist to get the password. Twitter I used to have a bit of fun with back in the day but I think I've tweeted twice in the last year," Dornan said.

 

The reality of living life out loud on social media looks like this from his perspective:

"The more public interest in you, the more horrible people become," Dornan said. "People start to say disgusting things about your family, about your children. What's the point?"

New Video Interview of Jamie and Cillian Murphy with ET Canada - 'Anthropoid' Press Junket

ET Canada - The cast and crew of the “Fifty Shades Of Grey” sequel were filming on location in the south of France when a man drove a truck into a crowd of Bastille Day revellers in a terrorist attack in July. Stars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson and the crew were shaken but unharmed in the attacks that killed 85 people in Nice. Following the attack, it was business as usual on the set of “Fifty Shades Darker”.

“It’s a strange feeling. You feel sort of bereft, but you feel an odd sense of relief that your family are fine and it seems really frivolous the following day to be making something as silly as a movie,” Dornan tells ET Canada.  “You’re contractually obligated to work the next day and you just have to get on with it but it was a very odd day to work, I have to say.”

The 34-year-old Irish actor has since wrapped production on the sequel, and is switching gears with his next project, “Anthropoid”.

Together with fellow Irishman Cillian Murphy, Dornan stars in the extraordinary true story of Operation Anthropoid, the WWII mission to assassinate Hitler’s third-in-command.  The duo play two of the Czech soldiers tasked with carrying out the assassination order against SS General Reinhard Haydrich, the man responsible for the Final Solution.

New/Old Picture of Jamie and Dakota from 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set

rosalinamakeup: It has been 20 days since we went our separate ways... Miss my #fiftyshadesfamily. I hope you're all having a great #summer2016 #paris #lastday #filmlife #gorgeouspeople

Jamie Talks About Filming of 'Fifty Shades Freed' and Terrorist Attack in Nice with Coming Soon

Coming Soon - Location filming in France for the sequel Fifty Shades Darker was overshadowed on July 14 when a horrific terror attack on Nice during a Bastille Day celebration claimed the lives of 85 innocent people and injured hundreds of others. The tragedy led to security concerns for the cast and crew making the Universal Pictures film, and Jamie Dornan talked to us exclusively today at a press junket for Anthropoid and The 9th Life of Louis Drax about how he dealt with the harrowing event.

“It was, as you can imagine, a bloody awful situation,” Dornan told ComingSoon.net. “You’d be affected by it wherever you were in the world. Most of the cast and crew were actually staying in Monaco so there’s a little bit of distance there, but my family and I wanted a little bit more space so we were actually staying in Nice. The first thing that everyone has to work out was is everybody safe, is the whole crew and cast safe. Then you have the strange thing of the next day still trying to make this movie that’s costing millions of dollars to put together. There’s this contractual obligation to work the next day, which is a very strange environment to work in. It felt very frivolous and wrong to be making something as silly as a f**king movie the day after something like that happened.”

While Dornan seemed genuinely shaken by that experience, he was a bit more upbeat about how Fifty Shades Darker is progressing, despite the replacement of original director Sam Taylor-Johnson with James Foley and screenwriter Kelly Marcel with Niall Leonard.

“The general feeling on set has altered, definitely, because the energy of the director is at the top of the pyramid and that trickles down to the whole 200-strong crew,” Dornan said. “Some elements have shifted somewhat, but it’s still a lot of the same recurring crew and the actors are the same, much of it doesn’t really change. Regardless of changing the director or changing the screenwriter, I think when you’re two or three -or back-to-back- into a franchise everyone’s relaxed a little bit, everyone can enjoy it a bit more because the pressure’s slightly off, so I think there’s definitely an element of that.”

Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson are set to return as Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele in both Fifty Shades Darker and the third film, Fifty Shades Freed. Expanding upon the events set in motion in Fifty Shades of Grey, the films will again aim to become the motion-picture events for Valentine’s Day 2017 and 2018. Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti, alongside E L James, also return to produce.

Eric Johnson, Bella Heathcote, Luke Grimes, Eloise Mumford, Max Martini, Tyler Hoechlin, Rita Ora, Marcia Gay Harden, Robin Lee, Fay Masterson and Hugh Dancy also star in Fifty Shades Darker. James Foley is directing “Darker” and “Freed,” which are penned by E L James’ husband, Niall Leonard.

An erotically charged romance, the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise has capitalized on it’s naughty-but-not-too-naughty aesthetic to the tune of more than $570 million worldwide.

New Pictures of Jamie in Paris Shared by 'Fifty Shades Freed' Crew

Jamie and hairstylist Danna Rutherford

dannarutherford: "Hard to believe it's been a week since we wrapped! A great guy to work with! #onlocation #mrgrey #paris🇫🇷 #fsogs"

Click on the pictures for their full size versions

New Pictures of Jamie from EL James' Instagram Takeover

fiftyshadesmovie: "Jamie Dornan pretending to read. #TheHawkandtheSea #PalomaBeach #FiftyShades - @erikaljames"

Click on the pictures for their full size versions

New HQ Pictures of Jamie and Dakota on the 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set in Paris (July 19)

New HQ Pictures and Video of Jamie and Dakota on the 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set in Paris (July 19)

New HQ Pictures and Video of Jamie and Dakota on the 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set in Paris (July 18)

New Pictures of Jamie and Dakota on the 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set (July 15)

New Pictures of Jamie and Dakota on the 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set in Nice (July 13)

New Pictures of Jamie on the 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set in Nice (July 12)

New/Old Picture of Jamie with His Trainer on the 'Fifty Shades Darker/Freed' Set

ramonabraganza: "#SoulfulSunday and grateful for the privilege of working with such incredible talent and #lovingmyjob. while I didn't plan to be a #trainer working in #fitness , #god had a plan for me. Here with my latest client @jamiedornan at conclusion of the #film #50shadesofgrey #celebrity #fitness #sexy #actor"

Jamie and Dakota's messages for their trainer Ramona

New Pictures of Jamie at the 'Fifty Shades' Sequels Wrap Party (June 24)

With hairstylist Amber Hassa

amby777: "Ohhhh Dornan!!!! this guy!!! Love him what a pleasure to work with him @jamiedornan #fiftyshades #christiangrey #fsd #fsf #filmlife🎬 #vancouverfilmindustry #50shadesofgrey #50shadeshairstylist"

With security member Shaun Wilson

@5haunWilson: "Best boss ever. #jd #fsog #fsd #fsf "

New Pictures and Video of Jamie on the 'Fifty Shades Freed' Set (June 21)

Media/Fan Pictures

Fan Video

New fan video from #FiftyShadesFreed set yesterday (June 21 - via renataotteson) pic.twitter.com/kmXth5tX1y

— Jamie Dornan Life (@JDornanLife) June 22, 2016

Source: @kingscourtgraph | renataotteson