Jamie Dornan reveals his surprising new role after Fifty Shades
One of our all-time favourite Irishmen, Jamie Dornan joins us for a chat all about his brand new film, Endings, Beginnings - created mainly from actor improvisation. We will also be hearing about how Jamie has been indulging in Fifty Shades of green in his country house during the lockdown, why he’s thrilled that homeschooling has come to an end and how he has enjoyed being at home with his children.
Discussing his new improvisation film, Jamie explained how the process “puts a lot of trust in the actors, but also puts a lot of terror in the actors. I’ve done a little bit of improv before, early on in my career, but not for a long time. Certainly not a whole movie’s worth so it was quite an experience.
“Honestly, the first night, I thought about running away. I was so terrified. We were shooting a night shoot in the Valley in Studio City in LA and the first scene is the first time you see my character and [the characters of] Daphne and Frank… they had already been shooting for two weeks, but I was filming something else so I couldn't shoot the first weeks. So everyone else was sort of in the groove of it and was sort of understanding the improv. And I came in not knowing anybody on the first night and I thought, ‘What are the ramifications here, if I run?’ But I came to my senses.”
Speaking about life in lockdown, Jamie admitted, “It’s been challenging, but massively rewarding. My kids rarely get me at home for four months without going away at all, they’ve never had that in their lives, and we have a rule, I never go more than two weeks without seeing them, but four months with just Daddy and Mummy there the whole time is just brilliant.”
And on having to homeschool he joked, “Our eldest is 6, which is kind of my level of understanding of education, so it kind of worked out quite well!”
Eamonn asked if he had been typecast by the Fifty Shades franchise. To which Jamie responded, “What’s sort of great about those movies and the success they had is that they’re so unique. It’s very hard to be typecast as someone like that as there’s no one like him really. There’s not been other movies about characters like him. It was such a one-off… the package was its own thing that you can only but move away from that, which has been a real blessing. And I feel that everything I have done since has been a million miles away from it… So I’ve been very lucky. I have an element of choice as an actor and I know how lucky I am to have that. So I’m making the most of that choice and hopefully I’m achieving that.”