“I’ve just done one of those f**king cryo – I don’t even know how to say it, is it cryo-chamber – things,” says Jamie Dornan amicably, as he comes into focus on a video call. The 42-year-old sits in a bright white room in his home in the leafy London borough of Richmond, clothed in a soft black hoodie, and hair tousled having had ice-cold air blasted on him for three-and-a-half minutes. (This, he explains, is how a cryo-chamber works.)
“I think it’s good for your body and your mind ... I’m training a lot at the moment for something, and I think it’s good for your recovery and all this sort of stuff.”
Is this “something” top secret?
“No, it’s not. I’m just about to start an Apple series called 12 12 12, that I’m producing as well.” This heist series will reportedly see both Dornan and Captain America’s Anthony Mackie star and executive produce. “We start shooting in April. So, I’m sort of getting myself ready for that. And to be honest, I’ve had time off. I finished filming a Netflix thing [the forthcoming crime noir, The Undertow] in October.
“When I have time off, I’m someone who needs to be doing stuff. I’m not good at rest. I’ve three kids so that keeps me very busy, [and] I’ve been training a lot, just because I have time to do that.”
When he’s not blasting himself in cryo-chambers, the actor gets his “cold fix” from ice baths, or sea swims – the underlying secret, perhaps, behind his ultra-cool demeanour.
Born in Holywood, Co Down, the youngest of three and only son to Lorna and Jim Dornan, Jamie has gone on to become a household name in (the other) Hollywood, with roles in award-winning films (Belfast), hit dramas (The Fall, The Tourist), and even a celebrity romance or two (he dated Keira Knightley before meeting his now wife, musician and actress Amelia Warner).
If you think you’ve seen his image in every screen, surface, and dream of late, it’s because he’s the new face of Diet Coke – he dons a wetsuit, swims lengths of a pool, tucks into some sort of diminutive haute-cuisine Ulster fry, reads a book on a bus, and floats around on a pink inflatable unicorn, all in the name of “my taste”. “Jamie Dornan keeps kit on,” one UK headline observed of his pointedly modest swimwear. Either way, Jamie Dornan sells.
Indeed, it is modelling, not acting, that has been the bread-and-butter of his career from the start, beginning with a brief appearance in the Channel 4 reality show, Model Behaviour.
“Luckily it was – not pre-internet, but 2001, 2002 – so the internet wasn’t what it was today,” Dornan says. “And the exposure from it was very minimal in a way. Today, it would be everywhere, it would be frenzied.”
Clips from this reality show, in which a 20-year-old Dornan (significantly less beard, slightly more hair gel) stands in a carpeted hotel lobby and answers questions about his skincare regime, can be found online.
“I wasn’t really featured in it. I mean, I know this because people sent me the stuff that does remain online, but it’s like a three-second clip. So, I got out pretty unscathed,” he laughs.
If the judges of that show didn’t rate him, the rest of the world soon would. It wasn’t long before he was appearing (in various states of undress) in campaigns for the likes of Calvin Klein, Dior, Giorgio Armani.
His status as a pin-up can’t have hurt when it came to securing a breakthrough role as the sultry Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades franchise (2015-2018), and for better or worse, this dreamboat image has followed him throughout his career. It is often his looks that get first billing in articles, with descriptions that wouldn’t be out of place in a racy Jilly Cooper novel. Does he ever get used to the experience of seeing himself plastered on buses and billboards?
I like toying with stuff that I myself am not comfortable with, and then really exploring that
“No, it’s not a comfortable thing. I mean, I guess we’re talking 23 years of a version of that in my life. And it’s less stressful seeing yourself on a billboard for modelling something than it is for a film, because it’s just this constant pressure that that thing that you’re up on the side of that bus or that billboard for needs to perform.”
Dornan’s film and TV career comprises a motley variety, from dramas (Fifty Shades), to comedies (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar), to war films (Anthropoid, The Siege of Jadotville), to don’t-mention-the-war (the 2020 romcom, Wild Mountain Thyme, received less-than-favourable reviews). Of late, he seems to have hit the sweet spot in his choice of projects, with two Kenneth Branagh films (2021’s Belfast, and 2023’s Poirot mystery, A Haunting in Venice), and two successful seasons of The Tourist, which was the most-watched drama in the UK when it came out in 2022.
In the offbeat thriller that blends crime, comedy, procedural, and western aspects, Dornan plays a man who wakes after a car crash in the Australian outback and can’t remember anything about his life leading up to that moment.
“That whole experience [of the Tourist] was kind of mad and unexpected and fun,” he says. “It’s not that we didn’t think it would do well, we just didn’t expect it to be such a hit. I enjoyed playing the character because there’s humour in there mixed with the sort of madness that’s going on.”
Whatever role he’s playing, Dornan’s approach is to draw on something deep within. “I think it’s remiss not to try to put a lot of yourself in there. There’s a reason why you’re the person that they’ve come to and why [the role] has fallen on your desk. There’s an element of me, and the essence of me that they want for this character.”
And so, it becomes a matter of trying to filter that essence into a fictional being. “I like toying with stuff that I myself am not comfortable with, and then really exploring that. Usually, that’s brought out from a lot of reading in and around the world that it’s set in, and things that that character may be into or inspired by.”
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A role that was particularly special to him was that of Pa, the working-class Protestant father, in Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical film Belfast.
“It’s the place that I’m from and it’s a character that I really felt that I knew, and I recognised, and was inspired by men in my life. And if you [can’t] find something special from being directed by Kenneth Branagh, when Judi Dench is playing your mum and Ciarán Hinds is playing your dad, then you’re in the wrong game.”
Chatting to him across cyberspace, it’s clear Dornan has the thing that counts in the business: presence. He’s a calm, engaged interviewee, with mischievous eyes and a Nordie charm. But how does a young boy from Belfast go on to become “Jamie Dornan”?
He laughs. “I think I always was Jamie Dornan.”
Then, more seriously, “I don’t know ... I never was somebody who desperately wanted to be in the spotlight in any way, or onstage as an actor. I’d done plays at school a bit, but never the lead or anything like that – never front and centre. But I’d enjoyed it.”
He attended the prestigious grammar school, Methodist College (or Methody), on the Malone Road, where he was a keen rugby player. But his teen years were marked by turbulence.
“The reality is I didn’t do as well at school as I should have. And there’s lots of factors to that. I lost my mom, and I lost four of my best friends in an accident, and I had a pretty difficult couple of years towards the end of my school life.”
I think it’s a really cool way to make a living, to be an actor and spend all this really rich creative time on set with these really inspiring people
Lorna Doran died of pancreatic cancer in 1998, when Jamie was just 16. The following year, a car accident would take the lives of those four friends and leave the entire community reeling.
“It was a grim time, to be honest with you. But what that did for me was lit some kind of fire under me. I got really driven. I remain really driven to ... I don’t know if succeed is the right word, but just to make something of myself, or prove myself, maybe. I struggled a lot with that idea of people feeling sorry for me because I lost my mum so young, and I’ve always just felt like I’ve had a point to prove that I’m okay, weirdly. I guess that could have worked in whatever I found myself doing, whether I was a gardener or an estate agent or an actor or whatever it was. I think I would have been hell bent on achieving.”
At the time, getting out of Ireland seemed like the only path to fulfilling the goals he had in mind. “That’s probably not the case now ... Now you could have a really great career as an actor living in the North or the South – in Belfast, Limerick, Cork, Dublin, wherever. But it didn’t feel like that was the case back then. It felt like you needed the bright lights and to go across the water to London and make stuff happen.”
Dornan’s first film role was an impressive one, playing a Swedish count opposite Kirsten Dunst in the Sofia Coppola historical drama, Marie Antoinette (2006).
“It felt like a really strong start. It was my first ever audition. I’d had an agent for about 48 hours ... Sofia had just won the Academy Award for Lost in Translation the year before, so I can’t think of a more zeitgeisty director that people wanted to work with.”
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But it would be quite some time before those early sparks became an explosion. “When I look back, I kind of took it all for granted in some weird way. I was really causal, because the process of getting it was so relaxed, and Sofia was so f**king cool, and Ross Katz, the producer. I just had this really lovely thing with them. It all just felt really easy. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be quite a fun career if it’s all like this. And then I barely worked for six years.”
Modelling kept him afloat financially through those years of “endless rejection”, until everything “changed overnight”, when he landed the role of a charming serial killer, starring opposite Gillian Anderson, in the BBC drama, The Fall (2013-2016). “Suddenly I was the lead in this really well-received and well-made production, at a time when I’d never done anything for the BBC at that stage, let alone be a lead, or co-lead.
“That has a seismic impact on everything that comes after. It just does. If you’re in a show that’s a hit and people think you’re good in it, then good things will happen.”
But the byproduct of Dornan’s acting success – fame – does not always sit easily with him. “The fame aspect of [being an actor] simply has no interest to me. It’s not why I do it. I think it’s a really cool way to make a living, to be an actor and spend all this really rich creative time on set with these really inspiring people and do the work. And if the work does well and people respond well to the work, then that’s a bonus. All the other filler bits outside just have very little interest to me. That’s just me. I’m not saying I’ve never gone to like a mate’s premiere or a party or something, but f**k, I do so little of that.”
[ Jamie Dornan: ‘Since my dad died, it’s lit this extra fire within me’Opens in new window ]
Family life is of big importance to Dornan. He and Warner have three daughters together. “That’s my focus. That and the work. So, I just don’t feel that I have time or interest for any of the other stuff around that ... And also, luckily, I feel like I haven’t needed to do any of that. You know, I’ve been really, really, gainfully employed through [the last 12 years since the Fall]. So, I don’t feel like, ‘Oh, I’d better be seen at that party, or presenting an award at that thing.”
In public spaces, he’s become skilled at appearing incognito. “It’s a weird thing to say, but when I did The Fall, I did a lot of research about hiding in plain sight and blending in, and how you move.
“It’s a name drop, but Eddie Redmayne is one of my best mates – I was with him last night and we were talking about that, because he did a lot of research for [the Sky thriller series] The Day of the Jackal. And I think I move well and cleverly within crowds. I think I’m lucky that I have a face that just looks like lots of other people. Eddie, not so much. Not that many people look like Eddie – he’s got such a distinct strong look, so I think it’s harder for him. But I think I can kind of look like everyone, which is really helpful. A cap and a fake pair of glasses work quite well.”
I want to tell stories from the island of Ireland that alter people’s perception of that place, and see things through a different lens
But if he can pass as a regular guy on the streets, there appears to be evidence to the contrary sitting on a set of shelves behind him. Are those awards gongs? “They’re my awards, yeah,” he says. “And there’s a picture of [the late comedian and actor] Don Rickles up there, who was my idol, and I got to know him in his final few years, which was one of the honours of my life.”
He casually lists some of the accolades on show – “Couple of Iftas ... a Bafta nomination thing. Screen Actor’s Guild. Critic’s Choice.”
But surprisingly, despite the recognition, acting is not high on Dornan’s list of future ambitions.
“Within the next 10 years, I would like to think I’d have taken a big step back from acting.”
Really?
“Yeah. I want to have more time on my hands when my body still works and my kids ... My mum died at 50. I just don’t want to be ... like, it’s had a big impact on my life, obviously. I’ve no interest in being in my 60s and 70s and, like, chasing something. I just want to really be relaxed by then.”
He’s recently finished writing a film script with fellow Northern Irish actor, Conor MacNeill. “I think we’re doing an announcement in about two weeks ... but the plan is to shoot our movie after I finish this Apple show at the end of this year.”
He’s also channelling his energies into producing, as co-owner of a new production company, Blackthorn Films. “I want that to soar. I want to tell stories from the island of Ireland that alter people’s perception of that place, and see things through a different lens. I love being an actor but it’s not everything for me and there’s lots of other aspects of the process of making TV and making film that I found really interesting.”
Maybe it’s cryo-chambers or maybe it’s something else, but Dornan seems utterly serene. “I’ve got so much more out of my career than I ever thought I would. You know, I’m just really content with where it is and the work that I get to do, the people I get to work with.
“I am a very ambitious person, but I feel like I am meeting that ambition. I’m not looking for more than what I have, which is too much, to be honest with you, in many regards.”
