After facing “ridicule” for his role in the erotic franchise, Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Dornan sought refuge in the countryside.
The 41-year-old actor received career-altering reviews for his performance in The Fall, but the backlash from the film adaptation of E.L. James‘ bestselling novel was a new experience for him. Dornan admitted to hiding from the world and not reading any reviews after the film's release in 2015.
He told Radio 4's “Desert Island Discs“, “I think I hid. I am coming off the back of career-altering reviews for The Fall to just ridicule, almost.”
Fortunately, the film's director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and her actor husband, Aaron, came to Dornan's rescue and offered their country abode to him and his family. “They let us have their place in the country and we sort of hid there for a while and just shut ourselves from the world a bit and then sort of came out the other side,” Dornan shared.
However, Dornan knew he couldn't hide forever. He was contracted to film two more movies in the franchise as sadist Christian Grey opposite Dakota Johnson‘s Anastasia Steele. Despite negative reviews, the trilogy – completed by Fifty Shades Darker in 2017 and Fifty Shades Freed in 2018 – made an astonishing $1.32 billion at the box office, becoming the seventh highest-grossing R-rated franchise of all time.
The success of the franchise didn't come without a cost. Dornan was awarded his first Golden Raspberry for Worst Actor in 2015 for his role as the kink-obsessed billionaire Grey. But he didn't let his critics bring him down.
In fact, he slammed literary snobbery and critics who panned the films in an interview with Radio Times magazine, saying, “I’m somebody who seeks out challenges. Choosing this for a career and dealing with all the (muck) that comes with it? If you can ride through all that, it probably makes you more resilient. I don't really sweat the small stuff much because I've had big stuff happen that's bad.”
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