Jamie Dornan needs to 'wake up', Amelia reveals husband's obsessions after portraying Christian Grey

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Jamie Dornan needs to 'wake up', Amelia Warner reveals husband's obsessions after portraying Christian Grey

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00:00 50 Shades of Grey star Jamie Dornan - 'This has been the worst year of my life, and the

00:05 hardest'

00:06 The actor opens up about losing his father, getting teased for playing a BDSM-loving billionaire,

00:13 and starring in Kenneth Branagh's Belfast.

00:15 It's probably going to take a while for Jamie Dornan to shake off his association

00:20 with Christian Grey, the billionaire entrepreneur with aberrant sexual tastes.

00:25 50 Shades of Grey (2015) was a blockbuster film based on a best-selling book, which made

00:32 more than £1 billion, had two questionable sequels, and some fairly terrible reviews.

00:39 There will, Dornan says, be nothing like it again.

00:42 "At the time, I was asked if I was scared of being typecast, as what?

00:48 As a BDSM-loving billionaire?

00:50 I think that's a one-off.

00:52 Getting close to that has come my way again - I've barely worn a suit since."

00:57 Walking on Rodborough Common, in Gloucestershire, Dornan is friendly and funny.

01:03 He says good morning to passers-by and hello to their dogs.

01:06 He has an insouciant take on life and laughs easily - look up his appearance on The Tonight

01:11 Show with Jimmy Fallon, when he and Fallon took it in turns to read the most lurid lines

01:16 from 50 Shades of Grey in different accents.

01:19 In short, he is good at being teased.

01:23 This is lucky, because inevitably he has taken his fair share of flack.

01:27 I'm well used to it.

01:29 You know what really helps?

01:30 I'm from a place where taking the mickey out of each other is our common currency.

01:35 It's how we communicate, it's how we show affection.

01:39 So if you're from Belfast and you give a load of s***, like I do to my mates, if you can't

01:44 take it back, you end up a bit screwed.

01:47 But I've always been able to give s***, and take s***, so I'm sort of armed for it.

01:53 But what Dornan is known for could be about to change.

01:56 His new film, Belfast.

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04:27 Strange thing to end the year with all this positivity.

04:30 He continues quietly, with so much praise for Belfast and a lot of good talk about the

04:35 tourist, because on many levels it's been the worst year of my life, and the hardest.

04:40 In March 2021, when Dornan was still in quarantine in Australia having just arrived for the tourist's

04:48 5-month shoot, he received the news that his much-loved father had died of COVID.

04:53 Jim Dornan was an obstetrician and gynecologist who had just taken on a professorship in the

04:58 Middle East, and his son was stuck in a hotel in Adelaide, grieving and unable to travel.

05:04 Grief is such a profound and complicated emotion and Dornan is clearly still in its throuse,

05:10 the family has not even had a funeral yet. Jamie was very close to his father, but had not seen him

05:16 for 18 months before his death, due to the complications of lockdown and his filming schedules,

05:22 and he is distraught that his father never got to see him in Belfast, he had imbued the role of pa with so much of him.

05:29 "Truly, you could search far and wide and it would be very hard to find something negative to say about my dad.

05:36 He was a beacon of positivity, that is my overriding takeaway. His kindness, his willingness to talk to anybody

05:44 and everybody, he used to say, 'You treat the person who cleans the court the same as you treat the judge.'

05:50 Dad had time for everybody.

05:52 I've tried to take that into my own life. We're talking about a professor of medicine here, an insanely intelligent man.

06:00 He was so positive, he would say, 'This has happened, how do we move forward and get something good out of this?'"

06:07 Dornan's mother, Lorna, died of pancreatic cancer when he was 16. Later, his father told him,

06:15 "Don't let this be the thing that defines you. Sure," says Dornan. "You wear it, and it shapes you, and colours you forever,

06:24 to lose your mother at such a young age, and life will never be the same again, but you can't lead with it.

06:30 I am probably a much stronger person as a result. I was young and naive and I had to grow up really fast.

06:37 I had to find a strength and resilience that I didn't know I had."

06:41 Another thing he inherited from his dad, he says, is that he never gets hangovers.

06:47 Despite being the last man to leave the party and the first up in the morning, his father seemed immune.

06:53 Dornan, too, should have a hangover today, having stayed up late last night with friends knocking back tequila.

07:00 You'd think he might at least be worn out from being so good-looking.

07:04 But instead he seems fresh and springy, as we take our walk on the common, beautiful even on a s*** day like today,

07:12 with its lovely views of the Stroud Valley.

07:15 He and his wife, the composer and musician Amelia Warner, moved here several years ago after falling in love with the area.

07:23 "We used to come pretending we needed to get away from the stresses of London,

07:27 even though we didn't even have kids and life was not that stressful.

07:31 When they did have children, they had an excuse to move permanently,

07:35 and three years ago, they bought the house they live in now, on the edge of a village.

07:40 There's two pubs and a postbox, it's not a metropolis.

07:44 Everyone leaves you to it, no one is that interested in what you do, no paparazzi or any of that c***."

07:51 "They have three children, Dulkey, eight, Elva, five, and Alberta, three.

07:57 I wonder whether he'd make a film like Fifty Shades of Grey now, when there's his daughters to consider.

08:03 I can be a real cynic, and if it wasn't me in the film, it'd be different.

08:08 As my girls get older, will they have to field some awkward questions? Yeah.

08:13 But will it have a damaging effect on them or my relationship with them? No."

08:19 Dornan got the Fifty Shades role on the strength of the 2013 series The Fall,

08:24 which made his name and won him a Bofta nomination.

08:27 He was convincingly creepy as Paul Spector, a social worker who was simultaneously a loving father and a sadistic serial killer,

08:35 being hunted down by DSI Stella Gibson, Gillian Anderson.

08:39 Before he took up acting, Dornan spent seven years as a model,

08:44 having dropped out of a business studies degree at Teesside University,

08:48 lolling about in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Dior, and Armani.

08:53 "It is hard to imagine him modelling, given the fact that he's just told me he has an abnormal amount of adrenaline,

09:00 and finds it impossibly hard to keep still, I can't have a day where I don't move, I just get really wriggly, I have to do lots of exercise.

09:09 But he managed. I just looked sad and thought about the money."

09:13 Clearly, Dornan does not take himself too seriously, which is just as well,

09:18 since he's made his fair share of badly received films.

09:22 There was 2020's Wild Mountain Time, described by one critic as an "execrable rom-com that's almost surreal in its unashamed awfulness."

09:31 Dornan sticks up for it, "I had one of the most incredible experiences of my life on that set,

09:37 working with brilliant people like Emily Blunt and Christopher Walken [John Hamm],"

09:42 but admits that it had its flaws.

09:44 "It has an oddness that I think if you just gave yourself to it, you would enjoy.

09:49 But there were also some very silly moments that were OIRISH with a capital O."

09:54 He has also made some exuberant choices, such as last year's Kristen Wiig comedy Barb and star go-to Vista Del Mar,

10:01 and some wonderful films, such as Matthew Hyman's A Private War, about the journalist Marie Colvine,

10:08 and Sean Ellis's Anthropoid, based on a true story about Czech resistance fighters, with his good friend Cillian Murphy.

10:16 "One thing he learned from Murphy, I hate to give him any credit, but he won't read the Telegraph,

10:22 is how to focus on the experience of filming and stop worrying about whether people will like it.

10:27 To just seize the day, enjoy the chance to work with all these cool, talented, creative people,

10:34 and whatever the fallout is, however it's received or does at the bloody box office, is totally out of your control,

10:41 so put the work in and enjoy it."

10:43 "We've finished our loop of The Common and Dornan has to rush off.

10:47 He has a lot on, a few days on the west coast of Ireland,

10:51 and then he and his family are going to Los Angeles for the American premiere of Belfast.

10:56 There will be a lot to celebrate. It's lucky that he doesn't get hangovers."

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