KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 15 ― Malaysian fans of Jamie Dornan will best associate the actor for his roles in Fifty Shades of Grey as billionaire entrepreneur Christian Grey and serial killer Paul Spector in the British series The Fall.
But viewers will see the 39-year-old in a very different light in the BBC First thriller The Tourist.
Dornan stars as a British man who finds himself in the glowing red heart of the Australian outback being pursued by a vast tank truck trying to drive him off the road.
An epic cat and mouse chase unfolds and he later wakes in hospital, hurt, but somehow alive with no recollection of who he is.
With merciless figures from his past pursuing him, the search for answers propels him through the vast and unforgiving outback.
In short, it’s every tourist’s worst nightmare and Dornan along with his co-star Shalom Brune-Franklin sat down with Malay Mail to chat about their worst travel experiences, battling the harsh Aussie outback and why memory loss remains a popular trope in film and television.
Dornan revealed he was robbed in Jamaica, an experience he’s never shared with the press until now.
“I got very violently mugged in Jamaica 2006 or 2007, that was one of the worst things ever happened to me,” he said.
“It’s not a story that takes one minute and it's not a story I've ever told publicly so I’m probably not going to go there.”
Brune-Franklin also had a near brush with death travelling to Thailand with her family in 2004 when the infamous Indian Ocean tsunami struck.
“That was kind of a spanner in the works of the family holiday, so that was probably the worst thing that’s ever happened travelwise,” the British-Australian actress said.
“But we were very lucky and all healthy and fine after.
“We both just told really traumatic and dark things, why did we do that to ourselves, we could have gone funny or silly.”
The cast spent some time in the Australian outback filming the six-part BBC series during Covid-19 in March 2021.
Dornan recalls plenty of flies and dust storms as well as intense weather but said the experience was rewarding despite the challenges.
“There’s sand and dust getting into the equipment and people’s eyes and as we went on, it got cold there.
“There’s not much going on there at night, there's one pub and a pool table and so it's isolating,” he said.
Brune-Franklin who grew up in Perth, had never been to the outback and was struck by its beauty and eeriness.
“Some of the hikes that I went on, you kind of felt this sense of ‘Oh my gosh, if something happens here nobody is going to find me’, it’s quite terrifying,” the Line of Duty actress said.
The Tourist may feature memory loss as a major theme in the show but the writers found a way to present the topic in a new light by injecting humour in unexpected ways.
Brune-Franklin believes viewers will always be fascinated by the subject given how precious our memories are.
“I think that would be a lot of people’s biggest fear and so it will always be interesting to an audience to go along with a main character’s discovery of rediscovering who they are,” she said.
“It’s always going to be exciting for writers to use that trope ― I’ve done it twice now. I imagine I'll do it again in my career if I'm lucky to continue to have a career,” Dornan added.
“The way they did it with the humour that was used around it, we don’t see that too often, it’s usually from a more earnest lens so I thought it was refreshing.”
The series which broke streaming records for BBC’s iPlayer service racked up 18 million views when it premiered in the UK and many who binge-watched all episodes were left wanting more after catching the finale.
“I’m pretty good at avoiding the Internet so I don’t quite know what all the fan theories would be or what the suggestions are or whatever it is about the ending but I imagine just having filmed it and knowing what happened that there be a lot of questions that people have.
“It was definitely a plan just to do it once but I know how these things work and I know when something is that loved and that many people watch it, then it changes the conversation a little bit so we’ll see what happens,” Dornan said.
All six episodes of The Tourist are available on Astro GO and UnifiTV channel 481 and BBC Player.
