Jamie Dorman shot to stardom thanks to being cast as kinky billionaire Christian Grey in the screen adaptations of the Fifty Shades of Grey novels, which were as beloved by moviegoers as they were savaged by critics.
In a new interview with Variety, Dorman discusses the somewhat incongruous experience of being in a critically panned blockbuster.
“The thing that I’m probably most famous for is a monsterly successful franchise that was not critically loved,” he said. “It’s a strange thing going into those films knowing that you’re going to be in a franchise that will probably make so much money and get negatively reviewed, because those books made so much money and were really negatively reviewed.”
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As he pointed out, those reviews were not kind.
“I went through a bad stage with ‘Fifty Shades’ of reading a couple of really bad ones, but then just finding them funny and letting them drive me,” he admitted. “One of them was ‘Jamie Dornan has the charisma of oatmeal,’ which — some people like oatmeal, so I thought it was kind of harsh. I remember that stuck with me, and I don’t entirely disagree with it either.”
Given the nature of the film series, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of the fan mail he received was a bit on the “freaky” side. One of these was “a collage of photographs of a kid,” with a note attached.
“Someone saying that it was my kid, and my wife should know that I have this kid who’s 7 years old. I think they were trying to say that the kid was mine and Dakota Johnson’s, and we’d had this baby while we made the first ‘Fifty Shades’ movie,” Dornan revealed. “It piqued our interest, let’s say. It was a bit freaky.”
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If there’s one thing that Dornan learned from his “Fifty Shades” experience, it’s that he’s not that interested in film franchises.
“I was ready to move on from this crazy chapter in my life. No matter who I was playing, I don’t think I’d want to play a character for multiple, multiple films,” he explained. “I think I’d just get really bored of that.”
