Fifty Shades of Grey star Jamie Dornan says he did not take the film’s blistering reviews well. Speaking with BBC Sounds’s Desert Island Discs, the actor admitted that coming off the high of his award-winning performance in The Fall, he was somewhat unprepared for the widespread derision aimed his way following the release of the blockbuster film that made him famous outside the U.K. Hiding out at director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s country home, Dornan told the show that he was a little intimidated by the idea of two more Grey movies being greenlit on the heels of that first one’s massive box office haul.
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Dornan played a serial killer in The Fall — a performance that earned him a BAFTA nomination as well as almost universal acclaim. That means back home in the U.K., audiences knew he was the real thing — but U.S. reviewers and audience members were usually meeting him for the first time in the role of Christian Grey — and they weren’t impressed.
“I think I hid,” Dornan admitted. “I was coming off the back of career-altering reviews for The Fall and BAFTA nominations and all the madness The Fall brought…to ridicule. We went down to Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s place. They weren’t there. They let us have their place in the country, and we sort of hid there for a while and shut ourselves off from the world a little bit.”
In spite of that, there was no saying no to sequels. After a massive opening weekend for Fifty Shades of Grey, the second and third books in E.L. James’s trilogy were sent into pre-production.
“It made so much money so like…films two and three were greenlit over night,” Dornan recalled. “It was a strange thing because there’s a bit of ridicule here and I’m now contracted to do two more, knowing that there will be much more damnation to come.”
Dornan has bounced back nicely, most recently playing the lead in The Tourist, a thriller about a man who wakes up in the hospital with no memory. Informed he was in a car crash, he has to try to piece together his identity based on whatever clues are available — and there’s a ticking clock, because it seems pretty likely there are dangerous people on his tail.
