The more I think about it, the more worried I am about Jamie Dornan’s career post-Fifty Shade of Grey. He’s got a great gig on The Fall and I worry that Fifty Shades is going to be financially successfully but a critical disaster, so much so that Jamie will be forever associated with this one crappy role as Christian Grey. I think Jamie is worried about it too, but he’s just trying to be Zen about the whole thing. Maybe it will work out. Fingers crossed. Jamie has a new interview with The Observer about The Fall & Fifty Shades – you can read the whole interview here. I enjoyed it, but I enjoy him in general. He’s neurotic and charming. He also says that there’s no “todger” in Fifty Shades. Ugh!

Whether he felt objectified during his modeling days: “At times, yeah; on the whole, no. I got lucky with that gig because quite early on I could be picky about what I did, where I did it. And because I was on contracts, I was working maybe 10 days a year and getting paid really well for it.” He says “working”. Actually what he had to do most of the time was “lean against a wall while looking depressed”.

Growing up good-looking: “I didn’t do particularly well with girls at school. I was always very young- looking. And my sister’s friends would always say: ‘You’re so cute.’ I f–king hated that. If you are a skinny, baby-faced teenager, the last thing you want to hear is that you’re cute.”

Why he loves his beard: “I feel uncomfortable without it. I find myself moving differently. I don’t like myself without a beard.”

He loves The Fall: “I’ve always got The Fall,” he says as if to reassure himself. “No matter what happens in my career, I’ve always got The Fall.”

Playing Christian Grey: “I am never going to please all 100 million people who read the book,” he says. “I’ll be lucky if half that number are happy with me playing Christian Grey. I know there are campaigns of hate against me already. Yeah, there is a huge intellectual snobbery about the book. And it comes from all the papers that I like to read. The Guardian is my home page on my laptop, and the other day I logged on innocently and there they were having a massive go at the trailer for Fifty Shades and I was thinking: ‘F–k, this is not good.’ But what can I do? I understand why those kinds of papers would have preconceived ideas about what it is.”

Why he never read the book: “Nope. Because we are the types of people who have the Guardian as our home page. Look, the film is not the book. It’s an adaptation, and Sam Taylor-Johnson is an artist as well as an award-winning film director. Look at her track record. And look at the film studios behind it. Universal. Focus. All I can say is, wait until you see it before passing judgment.”

How graphic is the film? “You want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible without grossing them out. You don’t want to make something gratuitous, and ugly, and graphic… Sam is a very bright woman, so there might be some suggestive elements to it, but I haven’t seen it at this stage, so it is hard for me to say. I’m aware of what we shot, and it wasn’t as if we shot a film without any action.”

His todger? “There were contracts in place that said that viewers wouldn’t be seeing my, um…” Todger? He laughs. “Yeah, my todger.”

He’s a feminist & he doesn’t think the film is about violence against women: “I think it’s very hard to argue that when it is all consensual. Half the book is about making contracts. Permission and agreement that this be done. There’s no rape, no forced sexual situations.”

[From The Guardian]

There’s a ton of stuff about growing up in Northern Ireland and still having “mates” from his youth and what they think of their friend from Belfast being considered some kind of sex god. He seems remarkably well-adjusted, honestly. I already believed that the producers would probably not want Jamie to do any kind of Michael Fassbender-like nudity, but I bet Dakota has to show almost everything. Which pisses me off. If there was ever a film for equal-opportunity nudity, it would be Fifty Shades of Grey.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.