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Jamie Dornan is an actor from Northern Ireland who made his name playing a serial killer in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ drama series The Fall. He was a model who worked with some of the biggest fashion brands before turning to acting. In 2015 he starred alongside Dakota Johnson in the Fifty Shades film trilogy, which was based on the best-selling erotic novels by E. L. James.

In 2021 he returned to his home town to play Pa in Kenneth Branagh’s acclaimed film Belfast, and travelled further afield to Australia to play the lead in the television series The Tourist which attracted millions of viewers and recently returned for its second season.

Here are 10 things we learned from his Desert Island Discs…

“You need a huge amount of confidence and self-belief to be an actor and to perform in front of anybody,” he says. “And often I think actors are the most riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing. I think there’s always this aspect of having to overcome something, but not overcome it so much that you have total comfort. I think you always need to be slightly afraid when you step on set.”

He has a way of dealing with his own insecurities as an actor. “I’m pretty good at convincing myself and backing myself, and I do think that can get you pretty far. I’m happier with my self-doubt because it always gives you something to try to prove.”

2. His dad’s career sometimes overshadowed his own

Jamie’s dad was a gynaecologist and obstetrician who delivered over 6,000 babies during his career. Jamie jokes that he thinks he’s met all of those 6,000 babies who are now grown up.

“The amount of times people come up to me when I’m at home and I’m like, ‘now here we go, they’ll say something nice about whatever film I’ve had just come out, or whatever, and [they say] ‘can I just say’ and I say ‘yeah, here we go’ and [they say], ‘Your dad delivered me and my sister and my mum always talked about how much she fancied your dad’ – and I’m like, ‘Och listen that’s lovely!’” He laughs: “It’s been a lovely thing, since we lost dad a couple of years back, it’s a huge comfort.”

Jamie’s mum Lorna was a nurse and worked at the same hospital as his dad, Jim. Jamie picks up the story…

“Now at the Royal Victoria Hospital there is a giant car park but back in the day there was an outdoor swimming pool that was for the staff. Dad was in the pool and he saw a beautiful brunette climbing out of the pool and that was my mother. And when the plans passed for the car park, they were about to fill in the swimming pool and Dad happened to be driving through the hospital and got out and, in a very Dad kind of way, went and found the head guy with the hard hat on and said ‘listen, what’s the craic with the steps?’ [And he replied] ‘We’re just going to throw them out’ and [Jamie’s dad] said ‘I’d love to keep the steps’. So he had the steps propped up against the shed in our garden for years that he’d first saw my mum on.”

4. He chose his second disc because of its orchestral connection with Ireland

“I get homesick for Ireland and Belfast and the people, so often while I’m away I’ll find myself Googling stuff. I’ll be on local newspapers at home, reading headlines and stuff. And I’d obviously typed in Ulster somewhere – I’d written the words Ulster and came across this recording by the Ulster Orchestra. This was just one of those pieces of music that I instantly went ‘I’m going to be listening to this a lot in my life and I do. I go to it all the time.’”

The track is the second movement from Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 – performed by the violinist Adele Anthony with the Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Takuo Yuasa.

5. His first acting role was Widow Twankey

Jamie grew up in Belfast during the Troubles. His first memorable acting role was Widow Twankey in a school production of Aladdin, when he was 10. He based his performance on someone he knew. “We had an amazing cleaner called Nelly Morgan, who was a formidable woman. She lived in a place called Short Strand which [in the 1980s] was a very infamous part of Belfast because it’s a Nationalist Republican estate right on the edge of a predominantly Loyalist part of East Belfast. It was a dangerous place [back then]. I don’t think Nelly Morgan would have ever been scared in her life – she was just unbelievable – and she used to walk from there, six miles, to clean for us and when you offered her a lift if we were like ‘look we’re heading up the road to Belfast now’ she’d usually say no. She was just brilliant – I just loved her – and I said, ‘Look I’m playing Widow Twankey and I’m going to steal some of your traits basically.’”

Jamie continues, “A big regret is – and I don’t know why or how it happened, they were probably just very stingy with tickets but she didn’t come to see the performing thing, we did two performances of it. But I won the drama prize and I was very smug. I guess it was my first sense of getting a sense of satisfaction from performance.”

“Rugby is a huge love of mine,” Jamie says. “But there’s also a sort of boys’ club side to it – it’s like you’re this kind of proper man and I’m fine with that, but I also think I knew there was this side of me that wanted to skip about and be a bit more free. And we had this drama studio at school and you’d come off the hustle and bustle and the madness of the main corridor and go into these big, thick black doors and you’d go into this space that was all black – everything was black. It sounds really depressing but it was like the most joyous space ever because everyone just left their inhibitions at the door in the corridor and you could muck about and play.”

7. His father’s wise words helped him deal with his grief after the death of his mother

Jamie was just 16 when his mum died and he says the support of his father and two sisters helped him during such a difficult time. He says, “Both my sisters are amazing people and I definitely felt that love and support. My dad, I remember [him] saying ‘you know you can’t let this [his mum’s death] be the thing that defines us’, and I’m really grateful for those words. It was like [he was] trying to say you can live a fulfilled and positive and happy life still. Now that doesn’t lessen the impact of losing mum or anything but I guess it was… Dad sort of giving us the OK, like it’s OK to see happiness in your future.”

8. One of his first big modelling campaigns was an eyeopener even for him

Jamie started modelling in his early twenties. He says, “I’ll never forget the first time [he saw a photograph of himself on a billboard]. I was walking through New York and I’d done this Calvin Klein campaign and there’s a massive billboard with [the model] Natalia Vodianova. We’re on this like black sand beach and she’s pulled down my Calvin Klein jeans and she’s basically taking a bite out of my arse [laughs]. Or looking like she’s about to do that. And I just looked up and saw it for the first time and I was like ‘Oh my God’, and as I looked up there’s a woman beside me went ‘that’s disgusting!’ [laughs] And I went ‘that’s me, that’s actually me. That’s my bum and that’s my face!’”

In 2012, early in his career, Jamie auditioned for The Fall, a TV show about a police detective [played by Gillian Anderson] on the trail of a serial killer.

“I auditioned to play a police officer who dies in the second episode,” he says. “At the time, I was happy just to get in the room. I didn’t hear anything. I was going to LA for a pilot season anyway, whilst I was out there, I was probably a week or 10 days into this trip and I got a call from my agent saying, ‘They want you to audition again for The Fall. It’s for a different part.’ I remember thinking, ‘oh here we go’. They said, ‘No, it’s for the main guy.’ I remember thinking, ‘If I get this, this will change the course of my career.’ I was right. It did. It literally change my career overnight.”

The show was a huge hit and Jamie was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Actor.

10. He hid after the reviews for Fifty Shades of Grey came out

Jamie starred as Christian Grey in the film Fifty Shades of Grey, co-starring Dakota Johnson, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. Jamie returned to the role for both sequels which, like the first, were based on the erotic novels by E.L. James. The films were very popular with audiences and performed well at the Box Office but didn’t go down well with the critics.

“I think I hid [when the reviews came out]. Coming off the back of career-altering nominations for The Fall and BAFTA nominations and all this sort of madness that The Fall brought, to just ridicule almost. Actually we [with his wife Millie] went down to Sam and Aaron’s [Sam’s husband] place and they weren’t there and they let us have their place in the country and we hid there for a while and shut ourselves off from the world for a bit and then came out the other side. [It] made so much money so two and three were greenlit overnight and it’s 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!”

Looking back at his work on the franchise he says “I’ve just had very glowing reviews for recent work and there wouldn’t be many of them that don’t mention 50 Shades in them.” Jamie laughs, “A lot of reviews are like, ‘He’s great, but lest we forget when he wasn’t great.’ Give us a chance! But, no, regret that I did them? No.”