Fifty Shades Star Met With Marvel Studios

Jamie Dornan, the actor best known for his role in the Fifty Shades movies based on the best-selling trilogy of novels, has apparently met with Marvel Studios about the prospect of taking a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The star admits to ignorance of the actual comic book source material, but during an interview in support of Belfast, it was perhaps inevitable that the leading man would get a Marvel question. After all, Belfast itself is directed by Thor‘s Kenneth Branagh. It also stars Justice League villain Ciarán Hinds  alongside Caitríona Balfe, Judi Dench, Colin Morgan, and newcomer Jude Hill.

As Marvel has grown, it has almost stopped being a surprise when big-name actors take meetings with Kevin Feige. Still, it gets the imagination going, wondering what role they might have been (or might be) up for, and how it would shape the Marvel movies if they had got it. To that point, Dornan stayed pretty mum, possibly because he would rather not engage with that kind of speculation, and possibly because in an introductory meeting, he didn’t have a real idea of what character(s) he might have a shot at.

“I don’t know a lot about the worlds [of Marvel and DC],” Dornan told ComicBook. “So I haven’t really seen many Marvel movies or DC. I don’t know enough. The comic book that I loved when I was a kid was Ghost Rider, and they did a movie of that with Nicolas Cage. That was the only comic that I was never really into an actual physical tangible comic. I feel like there’s so many spinoffs — like there’s more of those worlds that are gonna come to light. So maybe they want us.”

Marvel has an aggressive slate in the next few years that includes not just numerous theatrical movies but also a seemingly non-stop flow of original content on Disney+. Just in the next few months, there’s a Hawkeye series and a hugely-anticipated theatrical release in the form of the multiverse-spanning Spider-Man: No Way Home. 

Belfast, in theaters this weekend, is a coming-of-age story set against the chaos of Northern Ireland in the 1960s.