Jamie Dornan interview: I am more in awe of Brian O’Driscoll than Meryl Streep

Jamie Dornan is sitting at home in south-west London dressed in a hoodie and jogging bottoms. The casual look is a sharp contrast to the evening before, when he attended the Dior winter show in Paris, sitting in the front row alongside other celebrities.

In Paris, he had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Robert Pattinson, Joe Alwyn, Pharrell Williams, but now he is sipping a cup of tea and talking rugby union, a passion that began long before he entered the world of modelling and acting. It is one that still burns as brightly as ever.

Dornan was once named by Vogue magazine as one of the 25 best male models in history and has starred in a range of productions from BBC psychological thriller The Fall to the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, the acclaimed film Belfast to HBO dark comedy The Tourist.

But there was a time when all he dreamt about was playing in the Ulster Schools’ Cup final for Methodist College Belfast, and even perhaps Ulsterand Ireland one day.

Dornan largely played on the wing, where his speed made up for his then diminutive frame. His career highlight was making the Ulster under-21s squad in 2001, only for the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK to deny him the chance to make his debut.

Dornan insists he was never good enough. “I was rugby’s nearly man,” the 43-year-old says with a hearty chuckle.

‘I would be more nervous meeting Eric Elwood than Dustin Hoffman... honestly!’

Yet even now, despite regularly mixing with Hollywood icons at red-carpet events and awards, Dornan remains in greater awe of rugby stars such as Brian O’Driscoll and Paul O’Connell.

“I first met Brian when we were both invited to play the Dunhill Links golf tournament at St Andrews in 2014,” Dornan recalls.

“We had both been invited there for the first time. He had just retired and the first Fifty Shades and The Fall had just come out. We just got on really well. He is just such a great lad, and we are good mates now.

“But back then when I first met him, it was as big as it gets for me in terms of sporting icons. I have a lot of respect for Johnny Sexton, but Drico, being a bit older, was a player that I looked up to more. Paul O’Connell is another one.

“The following year Paul was also invited to the Dunhill. I know people are impressed by the people in my world. But I was sitting there having pints with two Lions captains thinking to myself: ‘This is insane, this is as good as it gets!’ I got a photograph taken of two Lions captains and someone who once sat on the bench for Ulster Under-21s.

“I am not saying I am not impressed by someone like Meryl Streep, but I understand what they do and have a grasp of it. I have spent endless days on set with famous actors. So, to me, it is not the same thing.

“With sport, there is a barrier there. Even though I played rugby to a decent level, it is incomparable to what the likes of Drico achieved.

“But let’s just say I would be more nervous meeting Eric Elwood [the former Ireland fly-half from the 1990s] than I would Dustin Hoffman,” he adds with another chuckle. “I honestly would. It is ridiculous to say, but I mean it.”

It is clear his connection with rugby is not some superficial celebrity construct. It runs much deeper, deeper even than admiring those who could do things on the pitch that he could only dream of.

Rugby would also help him cope with two devastating personal tragedies.

Dornan first played mini rugby at Fullerton House, the prep school of Methodist College. Methody, as it is known locally, is a famous rugby institution in Northern Ireland which has won the Ulster Schools’ Cup – the world’s second-oldest rugby competition – more than any other school.

It is a major event in the local rugby calendar. Thousands attend the St Patrick’s Day final at Ravenhill, Ulster’s stadium, and it is shown live on BBC Northern Ireland.

“I had a bit of gas, which I had to rely on because I was so small,” Dornan adds. “I loved it. I really wanted to get into Methody. At the time they had a real dominance in the Ulster Schools’ Cup, and I wanted to have a chance to be part of it. It was an utter relief when I got my 11-plus to get into the school.”

His bond with the game deepened when his late father Jim, a distinguished obstetrician and gynaecologist, took him to Lansdowne Road to see Irelandplay France in the Five Nations Championship in 1993 when he was 10 years old.

“Dad had gone to Bangor Grammar [alma mater of Saracens director of rugby Mark McCall] and captained the second team,” he recalls. “Although he used to say the guy who kept him off the first XV was Dick Milliken [who went on to play for Ulster, Ireland and the Lions, on the Invincibles tour of South Africa in 1974].

“I remember my dad, in a very ‘Dad’ way, almost driving the car on to the pitch at Lansdowne Road. I don’t know how he did it. He just drove into the old stadium and seemed to be waving at everyone and driving past them. We eventually ended up in a place not far from one of the corner flags of the pitch where there was a guy wearing a high-viz jacket. Dad jumped out of the car, gave his guy 20 punts [the days before the euro existed] and off we went.

“It was a mind-blowing experience. Ireland lost, but I remember feeling euphoric. Niall Malone, the Ireland out-half, was a Methody old boy and he kicked two penalties. I just remember how crazy it was to be in one of the clubhouses [Wanderers and Lansdowne FC] that used to be beside the old west stand. It was chaotic, but it was electric.

“A couple of years later I started to go and watch Ulster regularly at Ravenhill. I can remember running on the pitch after games to get Paddy Johns [the former Ireland captain] to sign my programme. The day he signed it, I meant so much to me. If he hadn’t, I would have been crestfallen, and it is something that has stuck with me through my career.

“If I go to a premiere now, I always try to give time to fans who have been standing there a long time because I remember that a big 6ft 6in rugby player gave time for me when he was exhausted at the end of a match.”

In 1996, he remembers a star-studded Harlequins team coming to Belfast for a Heineken Cup match and howling with laughter as the crowd teased Will Carling about recent allegations of his relationship with Princess Diana.

‘Rugby was a break from the unsettling grief’

Dornan’s school-playing career was initially underwhelming. He switched to fly-half but lost his place in the starting XV for the under-15s. In his first season of senior rugby, he played for the fourth XV and feared he might never realise his dream of playing for the senior team.

But, when his world fell apart when his mother died in July 1998, it was the rugby community that helped him get through the darkest of days.

“There were loads of people from school at the funeral and I remember our first-XV rugby coach, David Wells, coming up to me afterwards,” he recalls. “I was 16 and had one year of senior rugby behind me, but had been playing for the fourths and didn’t expect to be involved in the first and second XV pre-season training.

“Wellsy paid his condolences and then said he would be really excited to see me in a couple of weeks for the start of pre-season training. It was great for me to hear that. It was a break from the unsettling grief. It reminded me that life happens again.

“I could just go back to school and muck around doing rugby training with my mates. It signalled to me that it was OK. There was normal stuff happening beyond this day, which was really helpful for me at the time.”

The following year, he remembers having to miss a trip to Donegal with his mates because he had gone to a three-day sailing competition in Scotland. It was Friday, August 13, 1999. When he arrived back home late that night he was met at the door by his dad and sister Jess, both in floods of tears.

“At the time, hardly anyone had mobile phones, and I had no idea what was going on,” he says. “This was just a year after Mum died, and I was thinking ‘what else could it be?’ My first thought was that one of our dogs had died.”

They told him that four of his best mates – Chris Hannah, Chris Sloan, Nick Kirkwood and David Armstrong – had been killed driving in a head-on collision with another car. It was a tragedy so awful that it became national news. As a close friend of Chris Sloan’s elder brother Roger, a former team-mate of mine, I was touched by it, too.

“I was in deep denial at first,” Dornan recalls. “I remember reading about it on Teletext. There were loads of mistakes. The story was there, but it was all fractured. A couple of the names were wrong, and the spellings were wrong. I remember saying to my dad, ‘That’s wrong. That’s not them. That’s not the boys. It can’t be.’ I refused to believe it. They were bleak times.”

Dornan wonders how they all got through it. He had already stayed back a school year to retake his GCSEs after the death of his mother and had been receiving counselling to cope with his grief. But what is certain is that the tightness of a friendship group forged largely through rugby that remains in place today played a big part.

“Twenty years after the accident, they all got together to do a memorial walk, and I was gutted that I couldn’t get back for it because I was filming somewhere. I regularly catch up with them when I am back home.”

When Ireland played New Zealand in the 2023 World Cup quarter-final, he watched the game in the Rosapenna Hotel in Donegal surrounded by his old mates and commiserated with them afterwards.

Dornan did make the school first XV a year later and was named at full-back in the side to play in the opening round of the Schools’ Cup. But just moments before kick-off the referee decided that the pitch was too frozen for the game to go ahead. “I trained the following week, but when the team was named, I had been dropped,” he says.

In his final year, because he had stayed back a year, he was not allowed to play schools’ rugby because of age restrictions, and he had to watch Methody win the Schools’ Cup again from the sidelines. But it also led to one of the most enjoyable seasons of his life, playing club rugby for Belfast Harlequins under-20s.

“We only lost two games all year. One was an all-Ireland semi-final, and one was an Ulster semi-final,” he says. “The camaraderie was unreal. It was a real mix of lads. I loved it and probably played my best rugby of my career. I remember meeting my school coach who asked me why I hadn’t played like that the year before!”

Dornan went to Teesside University and played for Stockton RFC, a club with strong links to the film industry with both directors Ridley and Tony Scott being former players. “It was surreal, when I joined the club, they took a photograph of me signing for them. It was like I was in a boardroom with Alex Ferguson and was signing for Man United.”

He would fly back when he could to play for Belfast Harlequins and his form led to selection for the Ulster under-21s squad.

“There were a few decent players in the side, Neil McMillan went on to play for the senior Ulster side and Harlequins, and Scott Young played for Ulster,” he says. “I was picked as a replacement for the game against Connacht but didn’t get on. Then there was the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, and the rest of the games were cancelled. At least I think they were, perhaps I just didn’t get the call to come back!”

As his modelling and acting career took off, it became harder to keep playing, but he answered the call on several occasions to play in sevens tournaments. Dornan’s playing career came to an end in 2010, when he played in a 10-a-side tournament in Stockholm, where his side reached the final, which, he remembers, was refereed by Wayne Barnes.

The rugby connection continued, however, through his personal trainer, the former Harlequins and Ireland A centre Mel Deane.

‘American directors cannot pull off rugby films’

Our conversation continues to the forthcoming Six Nations. Dornan says he is at his most animated when watching Ireland play. The last game he attended was to see England dash Ireland’s Grand Slam hopes in 2024, courtesy of Marcus Smith’s last-minute drop goal. He would love to take his three girls to watch Ireland play and might return to Twickenham for the Ireland game this season.

Dornan is frustrated by the lack of Ulster players making the Ireland side in recent years, and does not envy Andy Farrell’s quandary of who to play at 10. He also does not think rugby movies work. “American directors would just not get it.”

He has been asked on four times to play Blair “Paddy” Mayne, the former Ulster, Ireland and Lions player who was one of the founding members of the SAS in the Second World War, but surprisingly not for the hit BBC drama directed by Stephen Knight.

“I didn’t get the call for the one that was a big hit. I know Steven Knight as well. Maybe I will play him one day, but I am getting a bit old now.”

Is there anyone else he would fancy playing? What about Ireland coach Farrell? “I’m not hard enough. No way. I might be able to play Paddy Wallace [former Ulster and Ireland centre] at a push,” he says, laughing.

Still, it is fair to say that rugby is never far from his thoughts.

“The other day I was putting our bins out,” he adds. “A couple of teenagers were walking up the street, spinning a rugby ball to each other, like you do at that age. I couldn’t resist. Like a saddo dad I called for a pass and, desperate to impress, threw what I hoped was a decent pass back.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]