Jamie for NY Times T Style Men's Fall Fashion (September 2013) - Pictures + Interview

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Read Jamie's interview with T Magazine below

Jamie Dornan’s Killer Instincts

Say you’re a handsome young actor on the verge of breaking through, but you want to escape being known for being pretty. What do you do to rise above it and establish yourself as an actor in your own right? For Jamie Dornan, the answer was to play a murderer of women — and to do so very convincingly.

The 31-year-old Irishman, who was first seen nearly a decade ago as the face of Calvin Klein, drew raves for his performance as Paul Spector, a serial killer terrorizing Belfast, in the BBC Two police procedural “The Fall,” which was broadcast earlier this year and will return for a second season in 2014. Dornan’s handsomeness is certainly part of what makes the character so arresting; the trim beard, furrowed brow and sinewy muscles definitely don’t fit the stereotype of the homicidal maniac. But what’s especially unnerving is how swiftly he can go from being a family guy, doting on his two daughters, to a monster who strangles his victims, then ritualistically bathes them and paints their nails afterward.

Dornan, whose acting career began with a small part in “Marie Antoinette” and includes a recurring role on the fantastical ABC series “Once Upon a Time,” describes his reaction to winning “The Fall” lead (opposite Gillian Anderson) in a single word: “Terrified.” He’d originally gone out for the part of a police investigator, and for a while he was convinced he was about to be fired. But Dornan, who prepared by boning up on the literature of psychopaths and serial killers like Ted Bundy, grew to enjoy playing “someone with that sort of rottenness within him,” he says. If anything, he got too deep into the part. “I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that I was saying ‘me’ and ‘I’ a lot” when discussing torture and murder, he recalls. “My fiancée had to keep saying, ‘Can you please stop?’ ”

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