Jamie Dornan, Kenneth Branagh once said, is far too interesting a person for someone so pretty. That was the gist, anyway. “He surprises you as being something more intriguing than his exceptional good looks,” were his exact words, right around the time he directed him in Belfast, the 2021 Oscar winner that helped transition Dornan out of his vaguely unhelpful status as “the guy from Fifty Shades of Grey”. When I repeat Branagh’s words back to Dornan over Diet Cokes at a publicity office in central London, I’m taken aback by the sincerity of his response. Dornan doesn’t blush or cringe. He doesn’t scold me for embarrassing him. He just sits there, touched, as if it’s the nicest sentiment he’s heard in years.
“Oh man, I f***ing need to hear s*** like that,” he tells me, rubbing gently at his salt-and-pepper beard. “Sometimes I’m just riddled with self-f***ing-hatred and doubt. It’s very, very nice to hear that.” Branagh, he says, has always treated him like an equal. “The first time I met him, to discuss Belfast, I don’t think there was a job I’d done that he hadn’t seen. He’d seen s*** that I didn’t think anyone had ever heard of, let alone been released. He’d really done his f***ing research on me.”
