Belfast star Jamie Dornan on losing his father while shooting in Australia and his proud Irish roots

The Tourist star Jamie Dornan was in the Outback when he got a shocking call that changed his life and left him “a wreck”.

Jamie Dornan was in hotel quarantine in Adelaide when he got the terrible news that his beloved father Jim had passed away from Covid-19 complications in March of last year.

The Irish star of The Fall and the hugely successful Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy was preparing for what would become the most difficult shoot of his life – five months in Outback South Australia for The Tourist – and says he felt the isolation and the sense of helplessness acutely.

“Getting that news no matter where you are geographically is shite, you know,” Dornan says over Zoom from Los Angeles. “I was stuck out there, denied seeing my sisters, denied seeing my stepmother – not ideal, but you’re a wreck no matter where you are when something like that happens to you.”

Devastated though he was by the loss, Dornan says he was grateful for the distraction of The Tourist, which began shooting ten days later. As the lead character, he had “insane” demands on his time and revelled in the tight bonds he made with the local cast and crew filming in remote towns “that only had the one pub and a pool table”.

Jamie Dornan spent five months in Australia last year shooting The Tourist.

“Having to get up every day and being the major part of this show, I think probably at the time seemed very, very good for me,” he ponders. “There might be lasting damage, who knows, but at the time it felt like a good distraction.”

Dornan was also grateful in the knowledge that his father took great pride in his career and in particular, the last film he’d shot, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. Not only is the semi-autobiographical drama about the Northern Ireland capital where both Branagh and Dornan grew up, it also features a stellar UK cast that his father had actually heard of. The great Dame Judi Dench and Irish veteran (and fellow Belfast native) Ciaran Hinds play Dornan’s parents in the coming-of-age story set in the late 1960s, at the beginning of the “the Troubles”, leaving Jim seriously impressed.

“It doesn’t come much bigger than Dench so that was a nice a nice thing,” Dornan says. “I am gutted he hasn’t been able to see the film but he, like everyone else from Belfast, would be very proud of the way it’s represented and would have understood the importance of telling a story like this that represents true working-class people from Belfast, which is what my Dad was.”

Jamie Dornan as Pa in director Kenneth Branagh's semi-autobiographical drama Belfast.

Dornan’s father had wanted to be an actor himself – and had been offered a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but was forbidden to go by his parents. Instead Jim became a world-renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast but Dornan believes to this day “there’s a part of him that probably would have loved to live that out”.

Nor has Dornan’s route to screen success been straightforward. After doing drama at school and youth theatre, he threw acting in for rugby for several years and envisaged a career in sports rather than treading the boards. Eventually he recognised the acting bug “obviously was within me somewhere”, dropped out of university and worked as first a barman and then modelling to pay the bills while pursuing his dream.

“It still doesn’t feel realistic,” he says with a laugh. “It’s a crazy way to think you’re going to make a living.”

Dornan says that while the working class suburb of Belfast that Branagh grew up in the 1960s was different to his more comfortable upbringing in the 1980s, he recognised the city’s characters and humour and saw echoes of his character, Pa, in his own father and grandfather. Even though it’s been more than 20 years since he lived there, Dornan still calls Belfast home and is fiercely proud of his Irishness.

Ciaran Hinds, Caitriona Balfe, Kenneth Branagh, Jude Hill and Jamie Dornan promoting Belfast in the Northern Island capital last year. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

That’s all I am and it’s everything I am,” he says. “I would never want to shake it off and I don’t think you can. I have always worn it with pride and usually people are pretty accepting of it. You know, there’s two types of people in the world: the Irish and the want-to-be Irish.”

He also relished the opportunity to cast the city in a different light. Although Branagh’s Belfast, seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, traces the rise of sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants, it also paints a picture of tight-knit community that rallies together in times of need and looks after its own.

“Some people think that Belfast is a place filled with hate and violence and I’m not saying that doesn’t exist, and there isn’t tribalism and nonsensical division,” Dornan says. “But it’s filled with great people with big hearts, who put their family first and I think we represent that well in the movie and that means a lot to me and would have meant a lot to my Dad.”

Jamie Dornan and wife Amelia Warner at the Belfast European Premiere during the 65th BFI London Film Festival at The Royal Festival Hall in October. Picture: Lia Toby/Getty Images for BFI)

Although Dornan and Outlander star Catriona Balfe are playing versions of Branagh’s parents, who are trying to create a better life for the two sons and shield them from the worsening conflict around them, he says the director gave them free rein to discover the characters for themselves, rather than trying for imitations they couldn’t possibly hope to pull off.

“I don’t know anything about his dad,” Dornan says. “You need footage. You can ask him all the questions in the world but if you’re trying to mimic something, you want the physicality and you want to hear the voice and all that sort of stuff that we were denied. So it was very much from the first conversation I had with him, him wanting me to instinctually bring what I felt was right to it and for myself and Catriona to own that.”

Jamie Dornan and his on-screen wife Caitriona Balfe at the London Film Festival last year. Picture: Lia Toby/Getty Images for BFI

Dornan is now a father of three daughters with English actor Amelia Warner and he says he could relate to Pa having to spend long weeks at a time away from his children for professional reasons. He’s been open in the past about his much derided role as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades bonk-fests and says that the success of those films has set him up financially and given him a clout in the business he otherwise not have had to take care of his family.

“I can definitely identify with that,” he says. “I’m much luckier in this era, and without sounding like a prick, the position I’m in, I can have a bit of say in my contract about how many times I get to come home. I have a two-week rule that I’ve only broken once in my eight years of being a father. We are like this mad travelling circus. We were in Australia for five months last year, we’re in LA for a few months at the moment. We just try to make it work for us because family first is the only way I look at it with work.”

Belfast opens in cinemas on February 3.

Originally published as Belfast star Jamie Dornan on losing his father while shooting in Australia and his proud Irish roots