Irish star Jamie Dornan on breaking out of the mould and kicking butt in the Netflix spy action thriller
Heartthrob British actor Jamie Dornan made a breakthrough for himself when he starred alongside Gillian Anderson in the Northern Irish drama series The Fall and became the centre of the drama in a performance that earned him the Irish Film and Television Award for Best Actor in Television.
Later on, he was cast as Christian Grey in the film adaptation of the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. The box office film franchise catapulted him into the international limelight and expanded his professional horizons.
This year, he returned to mainstream cinema, appearing in Netflix’s spy action thriller Heart of Stone alongside Gal Gadot and Bollywood superstar Alia Bhatt, as an MI6 agent Parker who was the antagonist of the film.
Read more: Netflix: The cast of Red Notice on team dynamics and being in a sandbox together
In this Tatler exclusive, Dornan talks about breaking out of the mould, acting in a female-led action movie, and kicking butt doing his own stunts in Heart of Stone.
You’ve made a mark with the Fifty Shades of Grey film franchise. How do you feel about breaking out of the mould?
Good! It was 10 years ago when we shot Fifty Shades of Grey so it feels like a lifetime ago for me in many ways. We had our first kid three days before we started shooting that movie, we have three kids now, and they’re all out of their nappies. A lot of life has happened in that time, I’ve done a lot of films and television series since then. I don't see it as ‘breaking out of the mould’, I just see it as like, “You're an actor, you did a job. Then you go on and do another job, and another job...” if you'd be so lucky. Yeah, I guess I’ve just gone on to the next thing and got excited about that.
What was the first thing that attracted you to the script for Heart of Stone?
I love the ambition of it, the scale of it, the story that they’re trying to tell, and our director Tom Harper’s vision of... “How can we tell such a large-scale story but also keep it levelled and grounded, and try to make the audience care about these characters?” that was important to me. It already had great people on the project. Tom, whom I’ve been a massive fan of for a very long time, Gal Gadot whom everyone is a fan of and is just amazing, Skydance who knocks it out of the park with everything that they do on such a big scale, and Netflix whom I’ve had a relationship with before and have been at the forefront for a good few years now creating great content. It was a lot of ingredients in the pie that was very enticing to me.
How did you feel about working alongside these amazing women in a movie with a storyline that, in the past, was frequently dominated by men?
It’s very important if that's the case and I hope that this is just the first of many female-led action movies. Gal proved with Wonder Woman that there’s an appetite for a female-led action film and a huge audience there for it. I’ve got three daughters and I want them to be able to look up to kickass women like Gal and feel that anything is possible in a way that little boys have had forever. I hope this is just the beginning. There’s plenty of room left for more people to fill up more and more women roles and I’m very happy to support and stand by that.
