Dornan stepped in to co-star with Dakota Johnson after British actor Charlie Hunnam dropped out - perhaps wisely. If the film does flop under the weight of its readers' expectations and the derision of the same critics who held their noses at the novel, then there is always the consolation that his compelling performance in The Fall also helped him win roles in two other Hollywood movies - one opposite Bradley Cooper and Emma Thompson in an unnamed comedy drama, the other co-starring with Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul in the supernatural thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax.
Jamie Dornan in The Fall.
Before The Fall, the 32-year-old from Northern Ireland was best known for two things: modelling underwear for Calvin Klein, which earned him the nickname "the Golden Torso" (ironically because his "white Irish body" required repeated applications of oily tanning lotions), and for being Keira Knightley's boyfriend.
That two-year relationship ended in 2005, but it's taken far longer for Dornan to shake off the disparaging "actor-model" tag. But then he readily admits that it was the modelling that allowed him to survive "hundreds and hundreds of failed auditions. If I hadn't been paid to model I would definitely have stopped".
A "dispiriting" sojourn in Hollywood for the annual "TV pilot season", landed him a role in ABC's 2011 fantasy series, Once Upon a Time, but true success was to come from a very different Hollywood - one closer to home; for Dornan grew up in Hollywood, County Down, a town on the edge of Belfast.
"I just think it's a very cool decision of Allan [The Fall's creator, writer and now director Allan Cubitt] to set it in Belfast because there's no necessity to," he says.
"When I first met for this, I said to him that I was so relieved to read something that's set in Northern Ireland and isn't directly involving the Troubles. And it just serves as a great backdrop, it's a cool-looking place".
Jamie Donon (far left) in Once Upon a Time.
The second series of The Fall sees Spector living alone in Scotland, but getting twitchy to return to his old ways. The unresolved ending of the first series annoyed some viewers, but Dornan says that having Spector still at large has set up a terrific sequel. "I guess with the second series you wouldn't want it to be just a continuation of the first - you've got to move it on," he says. "But this went beyond anything I had in my head - it was very exciting."
Dornan's position as the go-to guy for screen bondage is likely to be reinforced by the second series, especially in an early episode where his character straps his teenage babysitter to a bed - a scene that seems almost like a deliberate provocation to The Fall's critics.
Cubitt is robust in his own defence.
"My mantra during the first series was that we should neither sanitise nor sensationalise Spector," he tells me. "I'm a bloke so I can't claim to be a feminist, but certainly nothing I have ever written was written with some notion of degrading women."
Dornan says he couldn't call himself a feminist either. "But I do have some values and I'm well aware that what my character is doing is wrong," he says, giving one of his self-deprecating laughs at the absurdity of the thought that he might somehow believe that Spector's crimes were morally justifiable.
"People have seen the show as misogynistic and unnecessarily violent towards women. There is violence against women - but we're not just showing it for the sake of it."
Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Grey.
The actor has tried hard to humanise Spector, which is partly what makes him so believable. Indeed, Cubitt has said that one of the reasons that Dornan won the part was because he insisted Spector was loving towards his children - kissing his daughter good night, for instance, having just returned from a spot of voyeuristic, pre-murder burglary.
Dornan has an 11-month-old daughter of his own, with his wife, the singer-songwriter Amelia Warner. Was he affected by the role - was it hard not to bring it home?
"You can't fail to be left slightly scarred by carrying someone like that for two series," he says. "I do carry elements of him with me and, in a worrying way, I find him relatable. I must be careful how I say this but I do have a big understanding of him and why he is how he is - and there are times when I scare myself. You do carry some of that anger and that hatred in you a little bit, especially towards the end of the project and a few months afterwards."
But those disagreeable feelings wouldn't stop him making a third series if Cubitt were to write it. "I've always considered myself a very loyal person and if Allan wants to keep writing Spector I'll carry on playing him. That's if he's still around at the end of the second season."
What: The Fall, season two, starring Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson
Where and when: SoHo, Monday 8.30pm
- Independent
