During the shooting of one of 2024’s most hotly anticipated dramas, something utterly terrifying happened. Jamie Dornan, Danielle Macdonald (known on set as “Dani Mac”) and the crew of The Tourist were shooting a night-time action scene in a house so creepy they were all convinced it was haunted. Then, when they took a break, they spotted something that totally freaked them out: the word “Dani” scrawled on a wall. Within an hour, it had gone – to be replaced by the word “Mac”. Macdonald started begging her colleagues to own up to it – only to find that none of them were responsible. Then, one hour later, there was a new message: “you die”. There was no rational explanation.
Or so they thought.
“It was me!” laughs Jamie Dornan, clad in comfy jumper and beard when we meet. “Dani was freaked out to the point where I actually really, sincerely felt bad about it for a second.” He pauses. “But I kept up the joke for the rest of the day anyway.”
We’re talking ahead of The Tourist’s second season. The thriller’s first outing was the most-watched TV drama of 2022, with 11.4 million viewers tuning in to watch a shootout-packed, tense, funny series that followed amnesia sufferer Elliot (Dornan) trying to discover his identity, before being pulled into a world of crime that saw him take police officer Helen (Macdonald) hostage – only for the two to fall in love. Its second season shows no signs of taking its foot off the throttle, as it heads to Ireland on the hunt for Elliott’s past, ending up with kidnappings, molotov cocktails and some ludicrous laugh-out-loud moments. Think balaclava-clad thugs hand-jiving to the Pretenders’ Brass in Pocket and what must be the funniest ever mid-fight joke about a high-street coffee chain. It is absolutely wild.
Maybe too wild, in fact. “I’ve got proper PTSD!” laughs Dornan, as he’s asked about a plotline that suggests his character may end up launching into a virtuoso ballet dance later in the series. “I texted Jack and Harry [Williams, the showrunners] when I saw it: ‘Come on … What’s going on here?’” He covers his face with his hands and squirms awkwardly. “You’ll have to keep watching, but there’s something in there that I was potentially not … delighted with.”
It’s a strange reaction from Dornan, given that off-camera he is a non-stop joke machine. There are YouTube clips of all the embarrassing anecdotes he’s told on Graham Norton’s chatshow. Macdonald describes him as “a big jokester”. He even attempted to become a comedy writer at the start of his career, doing a blog for Will Ferrell’s Funny Or Die website, and writing a series of comic scripts (“although maybe they weren’t that funny,” he says, “because nobody made them”). If it weren’t for him starring as a horny sado-masochist in the world-beating movie trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey – the part he still gets most recognised for – you wonder if he might have become better known as a comic than as a sex symbol.
“The fandom of that franchise is still feverish,” he says. “They’ve got all kinds of mad theories. Like that Dakota [Johnson, his Fifty Shades co-star] and I have a child together. I don’t know who they think brings it up!
“At one point, we had a stalking, getting-the-authorities involved situation,” he grimaces, recalling the result of some “bullshit tabloid” publishing photos of his home. Fortunately, nowadays it’s restricted to weird sexy comments on his Instagram posts. “I get all kinds of mad stuff, which if I’m honest I’m quite fearful of, so I stay away from it.”
Luckily, the sex scenes in The Tourist are far less of a big deal: : an unseen encounter in a hotel room, Helen and Elliott sharing a an unseen encounter in a hotel room, Helen and Elliot sharing a bedsheet-clad smooch on a sweaty train to Cambodia. “It’s very weird to think I’ve done sex scenes with the actor from Fifty Shades of Grey,” smiles Macdonald – who has also starred in Hollywood movies alongside the likes of Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Aniston. But it’s her incredible chemistry with Dornan that gives The Tourist such heart. It’s so moving and charming that it has largely managed to override any objections to the fact that a character who falls in love with the man who holds her at gunpoint is not the strongest female role model.
“Trust me, it seems completely absurd to me as well,” she says. “Like remember when he kidnapped me? And now we’re in a healthy relationship? But it is very much something that gets addressed this season.”
Just like the first series, The Tourist’s second outing has its own distinctive tone, which veers from heartstring-tugging backstories to adrenaline-fuelled action and humour that wrongfoots you. It’s a feel that is becoming synonymous with its creators, the Williams Brothers – who first made a name for themselves with haunting kidnap thriller The Missing, and are currently blending violence and absurdism with BBC drama Boat Story.
“We get compared to the Coen brothers a lot,” says Harry Williams, of their desire to combine quirky details with action. “But not the Duffer Brothers, so it’s not just a brothers thing,” says his brother and co-creator Jack. So unable to resist including laughs in scripts are the pair – who initially attempted to become comedy writers (“before being widely pilloried and panned”) – that when they were working on The Missing, they started amusing themselves by writing deliberately stupid scenes “where James Nesbitt’s not wearing any trousers and is talking to an alien”. Eventually, they started putting the laughs in the actual scripts.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of rip-roaring action scenes. In the first two episodes, there is a scuba murder, a high-speed pursuit via quad bike and death-defying clifftop dangles. It’s not doing anything to dispel rumours that Dornan might end up being the next Bond – despite him having been publicly quite sceptical about it. Nor, frankly, is his response when asked if he’d like to take the opportunity to rule himself out.
“I probably am not going to be the next James Bond,” he says. “But I’m not really the right person to ask – that would be Barbara Broccoli.”
It’s certainly not the role he’s been most passionate about, though. That was a bit-part in DayGlo kids’ movie Trolls World Tour. “I literally called Donna Langley who runs Universal and was like: ‘You’ve got to get me in this film. I’ll do anything, I don’t care. I just need to be in it.’” It paid off, and he got to surprise his three daughters by appearing in a franchise they are obsessed with – only for them to start pestering him to star in Netflix’s equestrian kids show Free Rein. “I’m allergic to horses – that should be my answer.”
This time round, shooting The Tourist was a very different experience for Dornan. Inevitable, really, given that series one was shot in Australia just days after his father’s death, which happened while Dornan was stuck in an Australian hotel room for four solid days in quarantine (“I went into that job in very extreme grief,” he says). “I had so much fun the whole time,” says Dornan of the most recent season. “He really doesn’t sit still,” says Macdonald. “Jamie’s such a big prankster. He’s part of what makes this job such a good time.” Good to see she’s forgiven him for fake-haunting her, then. Assuming his confession isn’t a joke, that is. “I have to hope it was him,” says Macdonald. “Otherwise I’d be too terrified to function.”
The Tourist is on iPlayer at 6am on 1 January and on BBC One at 9pm.
