Jamie Dornan’s shirt tearing spree!
If you belong to the world of Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar and have gotten into a fight with the woman you love, there’s only one reasonable way to express your feelings, and it’s by running back and forth across the beach belting a power ballad at seagulls. That’s just what Jamie Dornan does with admirable and absurd levels of commitment. He sprints. He twirls. He kicks his toes in the sand. He even tears apart his teal polo shirt in a fury, which “was embarrassing, because half the time, I couldn’t even rip it,” Dornan told Vulture.
He’s all in to explore his goofy side after portraying some serious characters. With Barb and Star out on VOD, Dornan caught up with Vulture to discuss polo-shirt rending techniques, the twist ending to Wild Mountain Thyme, and how he can sing “just as much as any douchey actor guy.”
Talking about his character Edgar’s big song, he said, “In the script, it was just two lines of stage directions saying “Edgar then performs an emotional ballad, à la Footloose.” Then I had a conversation with the director Josh Greenbaum two weeks before we went to Mexico to shoot it, and he just kept talking about this big musical number, and I was going, “What the fuck? I don’t remember anything about a musical number.” So then I had to go back through it, and those two lines had become this big thing.
He added, “Kristen and Annie wrote the lyrics of it, and the closer I got to it, the bigger I realized the whole thing was. I was just like, I’m going to have throw myself at this as violently as I can and have fun with it. I’ve got a very silly side to me I felt like I was totally able to express in that song.”
He further added, “Everything was about making it funny. Kristen and Annie were there, and Josh was there, and our producers were very funny people, and they were all just like, “What’s the funniest way of doing this?” The first take, where I run down the beach doing this funny thing in my hands, was just them saying, “Just do what feels right.” He’s going through this heartbreaking moment, so I could just ham it up to the max. I was just flinging myself around for two days. It was so hot that I had to change my shirt up every take because I was sweating so much.”
On being asked how many shirts were destroyed, he said, “The embarrassing thing was half the time I couldn’t even rip it! I asked the costumer to cut it at the top so it would be easier to rip it, but I guess they didn’t cut the bottom, so for the first take I was really confident at the beginning, and then I got like a second in and got stuck at the bottom, so I was sort trying to hop out of it in a pathetic way. But then we did two or three more takes where they cut the bottom so I could actually make it work.”
He expressed his eagerness to experiment with comedy and is grateful and ecstatic at having received this opportunity. He said, “yes yes” based on the title of the script. “There’s a movie called Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar? I’m in! I thought it was a real place. My geography of the states is decent enough, but for all I know there’s a place off the coast of Florida called Vista Del Mar. I was like, ‘Have you guys been to Vista Del Mar?’ And they were like, ‘It’s not a real place.'”
He has sung in quite a few of his films and on being asked whether he wanted to do a musical he said, I” was meant to do a musical this year, and some things happened and I had to pull out of it. I always say that I can sing as much as any other douchey actor guy. We can all sing a bit. If it pops up in a script and is necessary to tell the story, I’m all for it. I’m not a good enough singer to do an out-and-out musical. But I love musicals and I love musical theater. I just haven’t thought about it for me. But you never know!”
