‘Fifty Shades put me on a path I didn’t plan to walk’

‘It’s over,” says Jamie Dornan with what sounds very much like relief. “I signed up for three movies, I’ve made three and filming is finished.” The man known to more cerebral observers of the cultural landscape as Paul Spector, the serial killer in sophisticated crime drama The Fall, is talking about his slightly silly but hugely lucrative role in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.

A multi-million-dollar adaptation of EL James’s awkwardly written S&M bestsellers, the franchise received a spanking from the critics in 2015 when the first film was released. (Although the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin praised director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s effort for not being anywhere near as bad as it could have been.)

Now, seated in a hotel in Beverly Hills, Dornan, who plays sex-obsessed billionaire Christian Grey, is bracing himself for more brickbats as critics descend on film number two, Fifty Shades Darker.

“People are entitled to their opinion and there are lots of people who hated it,” Dornan says of Fifty Shades of Grey. “It made a lot of money, but lots of people didn’t like it and had objections: about me; about Dakota [Johnson, who plays shy student Anastasia Steele]; about how it was made; how it looked; and what scenes were kept in and what scenes weren’t.”

In actual fact, critics attacked the film not so much for its faithfulness (or otherwise) to the original novel, but for its general absurdity and its dubious moral. It appears to suggest that a young woman can win the man of her dreams as long as she submits to his extreme demands in the bedroom. But Dornan is not wrong: it made an awful lot of money; more than $600million (£479million) worldwide. And therein lies the reason for films number two and three ( Fifty Shades Freed will be released next year).

The 34-year-old – who proved what an accomplished actor he is in The Fall – is refreshingly honest about his motivation for doing the films. “It opens doors in the industry,” he says. “If you are in a movie that makes over $ 600million worldwide at the box office, that helps your career and that means that you can get things like The Siege of Jadotville and Anthropoid” [two recent films he has starred in] made, based on your involvement.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do those projects that I was desperate to do, had I not been in a film that made that much money.”

Despite such candour, Dornan is not guileless enough to denigrate his own film. Millions of people – mostly women – enjoyed watching him and Johnson go on a journey of sexual discovery in various stylish locations in Fifty Shades of Grey and will no doubt flock to the cinemas to watch them do it again this weekend. So the actor will not criticise either the first film or the new one, which was made by veteran director James Foley after Taylor-Johnson fell out with EL James over the script to Fifty Shades of Grey and left the franchise.

“Sam brought us into this,” Dornan says. “So the fact that there was a totally new energy at the helm could have backfired. But Jimmy Foley just made it seamless.

Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson tell John Hiscock what made them submit to a sequel of the ‘mummy porn’ mega-hit

He is a very different person with a very different energy but very much his own man. And he has made some incredible movies over the years… his work on House of Cards [Foley directed 12 episodes of the Kevin Spacey television drama] has been exceptional.”

When I meet Johnson some weeks later, she adopts the same line. “James Foley did an incredible job,” she says. She is also at pains to scotch rumours of tensions on set between her and her leading man. “We shot the two movies back-to- back so we spent six months on them and we became very close which was lucky, especially because we were so intimate, and even the scenes that are not sexually explicit are emotionally intimate,” she says. Nevertheless, the 27-year-old cannot pretend she is entirely relaxed about the way the borderline pornographic films are received.

“It has put my life on a path that I didn’t plan to go down, but I do feel proud of [the trilogy],” she says. “These films are juggernauts and sometimes they can be frightening. I don’t necessarily regret having done them, but I don’t always feel completely 100 per cent positive. I get waves of fear and waves of insecurity, wondering what people are going to take from them.”

Dornan, too, has had to cope with unwelcome attention, including some vicious comments online and hurtful rumours that he and his wife, actress Amelia Warner, were divorcing or that she was being treated for depression because of the intimate scenes he

‘I don’t regret doing these films, but I also don’t feel 100 per cent positive’