Made in the Shade

Jamie Dornan talks fatherhood, friends and shunning the spotlight

WORDS: HILARY ROSE

The first time I met Jamie Dornan, five years ago, it was just the two of us in a café on Kings Road in London. It was the day before he got married, he was known as a model, not an actor, and we were talking about a television programme no one had heard of called The Fall. “So, Jamie,” I say now to the world-famous star of Fifty Shades of Grey, veteran of three series of the award-winning The Fall and happily married father of two, “you haven’t been up to much lately. What’s new?” Sitting in the Soho Hotel, Dornan grins. “Was it really the day before I got married? Man, that’s mad. Why did I ever agree to that?” His role as a serial killer in The Fall turned out to be the point at which people started to forget his previous career. He’d had a few acting parts here and there – his first in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette – but until then he was a model with ideas above his station, smouldering on billboards in his Calvin Klein pants. “It turned everything around,” he says, dripping honey into a cappuccino. “In terms of my working life, there’s before The Fall and after The Fall. I think there’s a label attached to someone who has had their photograph taken for a career that says you can’t be an actor.” It’s no coincidence, then, that his most recent TV role, Death and Nightingales, was adapted by Allan Cubitt, the man who wrote The Fall. Cubitt fought for Dornan to be cast back then, and took a leap of faith that he’d be up to it. Dornan says he knows that nearly everyone else involved said that he was wrong for the role, “and by the way, they were right to think that. I hadn’t done anything to warrant being a co-lead.” Adapted from a novel by Eugene McCabe, Death and Nightingales is a beautifully shot, sombre tale of love, betrayal and revenge. Dornan likes that his character is ambiguous, that there’s something he’s not quite revealing. He thinks he’s drawn to such characters, when he could easily have ended up being pigeonholed as the good-looking, romantic lead in a rom-com. “Maybe what we can take from that is that I’m not good-looking,” he says drily. “Look, Fifty Shades is probably about as much of a ‘Hey, good-looking guy’ role as exists.” True, but it’s not a rom-com. “No, it’s not. I wish it was. I would love to do a rom-com. I love rom-coms. I always thought I’d do comedy, not because I think I’m funny, but because those are the movies I enjoyed growing up.” As for all the people who said that Fifty Shades would be the end of his career, he worried they might be right. “Of course I did! Are you kidding? But my whole life is to back yourself and make the best out of any situation. Without Fifty Shades I don’t get to do Anthropoid, I don’t get to do A Private War. So I’m grateful to it, even though it was panned.” Dornan, 36, was brought up on the outskirts of Belfast, the youngest of three children and the only boy. His father is a retired obstetrician; his mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when he was 14 and died when he was 16. Now the father of two daughters – Dulcie, five, and Elva, two – with a third baby on the way, he says fatherhood brings that early loss into sharper focus. “We try to keep Mum’s name alive,” he says. “We were looking at lots of photos of her yesterday, on my daughter’s birthday. We want our kids to have a very strong understanding that they have another granny who’s no longer with us.” Dornan is married to Amelia Warner, a musician who composes music for television and films, and the couple chose to live in England’s Cotswolds precisely because it’s unstarry. Being a movie star there, he says, doesn’t help you.

I’ve still got the same group of mates I grew up with. They don’t give a damn about what I do. I don’t think they’re impressed by anything

“It doesn’t better your Cotswolds existence. It’s a choice we made not to be too close to this industry, because it’s not life, is it? It’s just a job. It’s a great job, and it’s very nice to me, and I love it, but I don’t want it all the time. Far from it. I do the school run.” Do the other parents do a double take? “They don’t care. They all know us. It was my daughter’s fifth birthday party yesterday and it’s that thing where you have to invite every single kid from her whole year and all their parents. There’s not one person talking to me about my career. We’re talking about our kids.” So was his daughter’s birthday party at Soho Farmhouse, the private members’ retreat not far from where they live? Dornan chokes on his sandwich, which has arrived, to his amusement, under a silver dome, and on to which he has dolloped a big splodge of HP Sauce. “She’s five!” he protests. “Listen, I know those worlds where that sort of thing happens, but I’m not giving a birthday party that costs a lot of money for a five-year-old. It’s insane. The party was at the local youth centre.” Dornan started acting when he was at school, winning the school drama prize for his role as Widow Twankey. He flunked his A levels and dropped out of a marketing degree at Teesside University. He says today that, while lots of his mates work in the City, he’s simply not bright enough. Instead he was scouted as a model and had instant, enormous success. He won lucrative advertising contracts with Dior and Calvin Klein, and travelled the world with supermodels including Kate Moss and Natalia Vodianova. He could easily have gone off the rails, but didn’t. “I think I had my moments, but maybe not too consistently,” he says. “I had fun in my twenties, but the luckiest thing about me is that I’m not an addictive personality. You’re in a world where you can become inured to excess. If you have a bit of success early on, then a lot of stuff’s presented to you that you could take advantage of in a big way. It’s pure luck that I don’t have an addictive personality. I love drinking, but I don’t need to do it every day.” Somewhat improbably for a man who counts Keira Knightley as an ex-girlfriend, he claims he was rubbish at chatting up women and never particularly successful. He met Warner at a party in Los Angeles and waxes lyrical on the joys of marriage. “It’s a relief to be married. It’s just lovely. That sort of complete feeling it gives you, especially when you start building a family. The idea of having to chat up another girl. To save Ireland, I couldn’t do that.” With him and Warner busy with their careers, juggling home life is a constant battle. He has just come back from a week doing a voiceover for Trolls 2 in LA, something he agreed to purely so his children can watch something with Daddy in it. Generally, though, it’s a balance. Is the shoot close enough that he can fly home at

It’s a relief to be married. That sort of complete feeling it gives you, especially when you start building a family

weekends? Is it for long enough that the family can temporarily relocate? The couple have just sold their house in LA because they were never there, and although he loves the place, he doesn’t like that movies dominate every conversation. “Work is not anywhere near as important to me as my family and my friends,” he says. “I’ve still got the same group of mates I grew up with. They don’t give a damn about what I do. I don’t think they’re impressed by anything. We’re brutal with each other. Where we come from, taking the mickey is our currency.” Dornan laughs a lot, but he has quite a severe resting face, apart from when he talks about his family. Then his whole face lights up. He absolutely loves being a father, he says, loves it. There’s not one thing he doesn’t love about it, not even the sleepless nights and 4am feeds. “If you’re not okay with that, you’re truly screwed,” he says. “You have to embrace it. It’s a shock with the first one for some people – you’ve gone from 4am being the time you get in from your night out and suddenly it’s changing nappies, but it’s a monumental part of being a parent. You’ve had it good, sleepwise, until that point, and you’ll get it back when they’re older.” He’s good friends with Eddie Redmayne, who also has a young family, their friendship going back a decade to their time as aspiring actors in LA. They did pilot season after pilot season, “essentially having four or five job interviews a day and failing four or five times a day”. Redmayne once said that sharing a house with Dornan was like living with an endlessly energetic puppy. “What an idiot,” mumbles Dornan, joking. “I was with him last week in LA, we were driving past places that we had very sad stories about. We weren’t really working then, nothing was going very well. It was similar to what you’d see outside the job centre, but with scripts.” Dornan spent years being told that he would fail. He was never going to make it as an actor, then he was never going to be good enough in The Fall, and finally Fifty Shades of Grey would make him a laughing stock. In spite of all the Hollywood hype, he still seems to be a lovely, down-to-earth bloke from Northern Ireland with a cracking sense of humour. And he’s having the last laugh.