Whatever floats your boat! Jamie Dornan revealed to Elle UK that while preparing for the upcoming S&M flick Fifty Shades of Grey, he discovered there’s a lot of people out there who “want to get spanked.”
Dornan, who portrays billionaire Christian Grey, told the magazine he studied for the role by visiting a sex dungeon, but to him, the film isn’t all about the novel’s infamous Red Room. “The love story is more important than the BDSM aspect,” Dornan, 32, said. “I mean, we are going to tell a love story, you know, it can’t just be what happens in the Red Room, that’s not a film. There’s so much more going on than that.”
As for anti-feminist criticism about the erotic movie, in which he seduces Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele, Dornan says S&M often actually reverses gender stereotypes.
“I can understand why people say tying a woman up and spanking her is misogynistic. But actually, more men are submissives than women,” the star, who welcomed his first child with wife Amelia Warner in November 2013, said. “Very powerful men. It’s a far bigger scene than I imagined: In pretty much any city in the world that you could name, people want to get spanked with a paddle with studs on it.”
Dornan’s full interview appears in the February issue of Elle UK, on sale now and available as a digital edition. Click here to watch an exclusive behind-the-scenes video of the star. Fifty Shades of Grey hits theaters on Valentine's Day 2015.