by Louise Ford
Fortunately for Jamie, his wish was destiny’s command, as his next two roles were a would-be pigeon snatcher and an outlaw with an eighties-style mullet. His friends couldn’t help but see the funny side in all that he turned his hand to. No amount of fame would see Jamie’s ego inflate – they would see to that. As the Belfast lad jetted to film sets across the world, his pals kept him grounded by sending photos of him as a gawky teenager on WhatsApp. Not that he needed it, of course; Jamie was still as down to earth as they came. ‘I would put “ironing shirt sleeves” up there as one of the world’s toughest tasks,’ he tweeted five days after The Fall aired for the first time. He was clearly taking everything in his stride.
Chapter Fourteen
GOING FOR GREY
Jamie was now getting seriously good at auditions. Whereas previously he’d struggled to bag the role, standing nervously in front of casting agents, his experience on The Fall had clearly given him newfound confidence.
Soon after filming finished on the Belfast-based crime series, Jamie landed the lead role in Dutch flick Flying Home, as director Dominique Deruddere admitted that he was instantly taken with the former Calvin Klein clothes horse.
Jamie was to play Colin, a New York businessman who has to convince the elderly owner of a champion racing pigeon in Belgium to sell his beloved bird to a rich Arab sheik. But Colin ends up falling for his granddaughter. Reading the script was love at first sight for the rising star and having a foreign independent film with an esteemed European director at its helm would undeniably look good on his acting CV. Moreover, playing a man who falls in love with a pretty girl while hunting down a pigeon in Belgium was going to be a walk in the park compared to strangling young women in Belfast, as their eyes bulged in terror. In short, this film ticked all the right boxes. ‘I don’t read scripts too often that have as much soul as this. I thought the script was really heartfelt, a little bit kooky, a little bit European … so I ended up doing it because I liked the script and I love Dominique.’
Casting the role hadn’t been straightforward. They were looking for someone who fitted the description of ‘handsome and successful’, which was easy enough, but they also needed someone who could convincingly flit seamlessly between ruthless businessman and sensitive lover. British casting agent Kate Dowd had sent Belgium-born moviemaker Deruddere hundreds of résumés and tapes from young actors keen to scoop the part but no one seemed to have the ‘second layer’ and depth of character that he was looking for. Until, that is, he stumbled across Jamie. After watching his casting tape, he called up Jamie’s agent and asked him in for some tryout sessions. ‘He had more to him than his pretty boy look had first revealed,’ he said. ‘This young fashion model turned out to be a solid actor.
‘Further casting sessions with Jamie strengthened my impression that he would be able to act out Colin’s deceitful plan without viewers losing sympathy for him.’
‘It was very nice working with him,’ he added. ‘He’s a great guy and a very good actor.’
The role was his and Jamie, drawing on all he had learned from The Fall, quickly got to work on researching the unusual hobby of pigeon fancying – the art and science of breeding pigeons and entering them for races the world over. ‘Pigeon fancying is something I knew little about but it’s quite an interesting world. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from it, which is something I wasn’t aware of. The only person I ever knew who’d done it before was boxer Mike Tyson, he is into pigeon fancying in a big way so I guess if someone as high profile as that and as aggressive as that is into something as obscure as pigeon fancying it must be worth something.’
As the summer of 2012 drew to a close, Jamie was enjoying the distinct holiday feeling and little known perks of working on a Flemish movie, as he flitted between the film’s locations in Dubai and Belgium. ‘Working on a Flemish set is relaxed, everyone is very chilled, obviously there’s beer at the end of every day, obviously we still have a lot of work to do but they create a very nice atmosphere,’ he said.
The cast was also incredibly welcoming, and Jamie and his on-screen lover Charlotte de Bruyne quickly bonded, particularly since she’d done her homework beforehand by searching for him on the internet in order to garner the inside track into who he was. ‘I only knew that he had been a Calvin Klein model. When Googling I really had to chuckle when I read about his relationship with Keira Knightley,’ she admitted. ‘Jamie was at the beginning of his acting career and so he felt like an equal to me. I felt that he was just as I was, still a little unsure – he may be older but I had the feeling that we were at the same stage in our lives.’
The feeling was mutual and the duo enjoyed some hilarious moments together on set. Whereas Charlotte’s English was word-perfect, Jamie amused the cast and crew with his mispronunciation of a variety of Belgian words and, in particular, the director’s surname. ‘I love Dominique Deruddere, he’s brilliant. I was calling him Dominique. What was I saying? Deruuder for a while, thinking that’s how you say it but I still can’t say it that well. He’s amazing; he’s like the nicest guy in the world and a great director,’ Jamie gushed after filming finished.
Back home, in his swanky pad in London with girlfriend Amelia, it was time to put his feet up before welcoming what would be one of the biggest years of his life, not just professionally but personally. Having just recovered from surgery on his shoulder, and as the year drew to a close, Jamie already had good news to reflect on. The first – and due to the public outcry by Once Upon A Time fans after the show’s creators killed off his character in the first series – was that Jamie had been invited to go back for a cameo appearance, which he duly accepted.
After returning from his five-week honeymoon in June with Amelia, just as the first episodes of The Fall were being screened, it wasn’t long before it was back to business and back on set. Jamie had been chosen to star in Channel 4 historical four-part miniseries New Worlds, in which he would play an outlaw. Set during the Restoration period, as Charles II took back the throne with a reign of terror, Jamie and his co-stars played young revolutionaries and star-crossed lovers fighting on both sides of the Atlantic. London Evening Standard told viewers to ‘Expect sex, murder, plotting and treason […] this will fill a Game of Thrones-shaped hole until the new season starts in April.’
As if that wasn’t enough, he had also been nominated for his first-ever acting award and was up for Best Actor for his part in The Fall at the forthcoming TV Choice Awards. It was a major feat for someone who just a year before had been a relative unknown in the TV and film world, yet he was now receiving a nomination alongside Doctor Who’s Matt Smith and David Tennant in hit ITV drama Broadchurch.
Although Jamie didn’t make it into the final four for the awards ceremony, he was at least now regarded as being up there with the cream of the industry. And the highly skilled cast on his new show, which included Skins actress Freya Mavor and Joe Dempsie from Games of Thrones, was testament to how far he’d come. ‘It has attracted a diverse and glittering cast,’ Channel 4’s head of drama Piers Wenger said of the hotly anticipated sequel to 2008 BAFTA-nominated The Devil’s Whore.
The bloody drama New Worlds would see Jamie’s character, a rebel named Abe Goffe, trying to overthrow the monarchy in 1680s England. Running around the film with a gun and crossbow was a dream role for Jamie; apart from giving him a respite from the gritty months of playing Paul Spector, it also gave him a chance to play out his boyhood fantasies. ‘Being an outlaw was great fun. I’m probably stuck in some transition period from boy to man but I loved all that running through woods with guns, arrows, unwashed hair and your band of mates, indulging my inner Robin Hood.
‘Essentially it was the script that drew me then the character that I felt I could play … then I hoped I’d get on with the director and everyone else. On all these counts I have been so lucky with New Worlds.’
And like all of his roles – from the ponytailed lover of Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette to love-struck p
igeon stalker – there was ample material for Jamie getting a good ribbing. Filming hadn’t even started before the laughter broke out on set when the wardrobe team styled Jamie a mullet glued to his own hair, while the rest of the cast sported handsome wigs. Seeing the funny side, he explained: ‘It’s my real, curly bap – then we added a sort of eighties rock thing around the back and sides to give it that seventeenth century feel. I was happy with it.’
While it was a source of hilarity during its seven-month production in Bristol, with co-stars saying it made him look like a seventeenth-century Russell Brand, it didn’t go unnoticed by amused critics either. ‘Goffe’s wild existence accounts for Dornan’s unkempt hair. While most of the cast sport rather elaborate full-head wigs Dornan gets some straggling wisps glued to his own short back and sides,’ one noted. Another complained, ‘New Worlds Jamie, idealist outlaw Abe, finally appeared after ten minutes but when he did, his mullet was just too distracting.’
Despite the teasing, Jamie had quickly settled into life on set thanks in no small part to his co-stars, in particular Freya who played his on-screen lover Beth. He also enjoyed the heavy historical research behind the character and revelled in learning about a new period of history after the show’s writers and creators Martine Brant and Peter Flannery gave them a booklist to work through. ‘A couple of books were suggested to us. There was one Cavalier by Lucy Worsley that I know Freya and I both read that was recommended by Martine. It became a joke competition between Freya and I to finish it, my copy was more subtly on my iPad but Freya constantly lugged her copy everywhere as I teased and tested her knowledge.
‘Because I went to school in Belfast, the English Civil War wasn’t high on the curriculum. So to some extent I had to learn from scratch. I had no idea that it was such a barbaric time. We don’t want it to be a history lesson but I think audiences will learn something from watching New Worlds,’ he told the Sunday Mail.
As he did with all his characters, Jamie delved deep into their psyche and tried hard to find something within them that he could relate to. In this case, the rising star was convinced that teenagers would be able to identify with the battles his character faced. ‘Young people still feel enraged about the same injustices. I like to think people now are treated with greater decency and things aren’t as brutal and bloody as they were at that time,’ he explained.
Jamie also looked to some of his more boisterous and feisty friends for inspiration when working through how to physicalise the character, since Abe was quick to fight with his hands rather than talking through his concerns. ‘The thing about Abe was there’s a lot of talk, and he is one of those people who talks with his fists,’ Jamie said of the part. ‘But you meet these guys, in any time period, who are very headstrong. I have mates like that who are just f**king aggressive. They move a certain way, especially around other people, around new people. They bristle up a little bit. And I tried to draw on some of that for Abe. He isn’t comfortable with company outside of his very select few.’
But while it had been an interesting project for Jamie, the reviews were mixed when it premiered the following April. ‘Idealists might be inspiring in history books but they don’t make for captivating TV characters,’ said a review in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Even Jamie can’t save Channel 4’s latest historical drama New Worlds. I will probably be thrown in the stocks for saying so but I’ll happily take a rotten egg to the face if it means not having to sit through this hammy romp again,’ TV critic Oliver Grady added to the complaints. ‘His chemistry with leading lady Freya Mavor was convincing but ruined by the writers expecting us to believe her character Beth would have fallen for a man only a few minutes after he abducted her – even if he does look like Jamie Dornan.’
However, perhaps, falling for Dornan’s charms in a matter of seconds might not have been wholly unrealistic. Indeed, his next role was to be bigger, better and more extraordinary than the talented man would ever have expected. And a great slice of that Irish charm to which Doran had often attributed his success, rather than to raw talent, would clearly see him right again.
The book on everyone’s lips – Fifty Shades of Grey – which had sold over 2 million copies in just one month after it hit bookshelves in June 2011 was being made into a film. The steamy novel published by Vintage Books, which made the New York Times bestseller list, later became the quickest selling book in history after selling 100 million copies in three years. It revolved around a female college student, Anastasia Steele, who finds herself in a kinky relationship involving sadomasochism and submission with a twenty-seven-year-old billionaire called Christian Grey. The book’s two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, probe into the couple’s deepening relationship.
With such a massive readership, largely believed to be women over the age of thirty but also reportedly popular with teenagers and students alike, the erotic must-read was always destined for Hollywood. Its author Erika Leonard, better known under her pen name E.L. James, had orchestrated a deal with careful consideration after countless approaches by film-makers desperate to make it their own. ‘I didn’t know if [selling it to Hollywood] was the right thing to do. Then I thought, “I’m middle-aged – when in the hell am I going to get another chance to make a movie?”’ she admitted.
In March 2012, after a fierce bidding war between ten of the world’s top studios, including Sony, Warner Bros and Paramount, James plumped on selling the book’s film rights to Universal Pictures and Focus Features in a £3 million deal. The canny British TV executive-turned-author had managed to broker a deal in which she would retain some control during the movie’s creative process. As well as hand-picking the director and producers, the forty-eight-year-old mum-of-two revealed that the studios had, in a rare move, also granted her cast and script approvals.
The plucky writer, who admitted a ‘midlife crisis’ had led to her writing the erotic romance fiction, was won over by Universal chairman Donna Langley – who ‘loved the books’ and ‘made a great cup of tea’ – and Focus president of production Jeb Brody. The latter’s previous hits included Lost in Translation and The Pianist, and she had ‘a great background in handling difficult material’. ‘I really like clever men who challenge you,’ James told Entertainment Weekly, ‘and with Jeb, I thought, yeah, I can work with that!’ After admitting she was given control over most aspects of the film, she added, ‘This makes me sound like a control freak, doesn’t it.’
The truth was that the kinky antics between powerful businessman Christian and demure student Anastasia were ‘every fantasy I’d ever had’, the writer claimed, which had been rolled into one steamy and powerfully provocative novel.
Having achieved such unexpected success with the trilogy, the last thing E.L. James wanted was to see the chemistry and sizzling sexual desire between the two main protagonists get lost in translation from page to the big screen. She wanted and needed to ensure that every aspect of their intimate and somewhat debauched relationship was projected flawlessly. ‘This is my midlife crisis, all my fantasies out there, it’s all in that book. I was a woman obsessed for two years I was writing it everywhere, at home, on the train.
‘I’m stunned at how popular it is,’ she told America’s Today programme, adding that she wasn’t a ‘great writer’ and had only penned it as a hobby. Although critics were branding it ‘mummy porn’, it was a runaway success, translated into fifty-one different languages and winning rave reviews from fans around the world. ‘It makes you squirm in your seat,’ a businesswoman in her twenties admitted to a TV show. ‘Women who are reading it say they are having more sex with their husbands,’ a therapist revealed, while a mother-of-three told one of the hundreds of internet forums that had sprung up about the book, ‘it definitely, for lack of a better word, gets you going.’
It was evidently hugely important to James to ‘get it right’. ‘This is huge. There is this passionate fandom, we need to get this right for them,’ she explained. Moreover, Fifty Shades of Grey was also q
uickly becoming a multimillion-pound brand which would bring with it a range of spin-off merchandise, including a CD of music the author wrote the story to, bottles of wine, T-shirts with slogans from the book and sex toys such as the infamous silver pleasure balls, handcuffs and crops, as immortalised in the series.
News of the forthcoming Fifty Shades movie, meanwhile, had spread like wildfire across Hollywood, sparking a feeding frenzy within all areas of production. Top producers such as Brian Grazer, Adam Shankman, Scott Stuber, Doug and Lucy Wick, and Stacy Cramer had all reportedly been courting James and her agent Valerie Hoskins. It was important that E.L. James had the perfect team and, along with the bigwigs at Universal and Focus, she decided to hire Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti, producers of The Social Network for which they won a Best Picture Oscar nomination. ‘At its core, Fifty Shades of Grey is a complex love story, requiring a delicate and sophisticated hand to bring it to the big screen,’ said Universal co-chairman Donna Langley in a statement. ‘Mike and Dana’s credits more than exemplify what we need in creative partners, and we’re glad to have them as part of our team.’ Both producers had been known for their work on book adaptations. As well as their collaboration with producer Scott Rudin on the 2010 drama The Social Network – based on the creators of Facebook and adapted from the non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires – De Luca had also produced 2011 hit baseball movie Moneyball, based on the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning.
The next job was to hire a director along with a stellar cast, most importantly securing the right Christian Grey. Finding someone able to fill the criteria needed was going to be tough, chiefly because every reader – all 100 million of them – had created in their mind a very exact image of what the sadistic, controlling billionaire looked like. Few casting agents could have experienced that kind of pressure before.
