Irish Eye on Hollywood: Dornan’s Wars

Jamie Dornan is working feverishly to branch out from the Fifty Shades franchise, taking on roles in an eclectic mix of offbeat and serious projects.  Not long ago, he was in the campy HBO flick My Dinner with Hervé, playing a journalist who gets caught up in the vortex of ’70s celebrity with Hervé Villechaize. Villechaize had his 15 minutes of fame thanks to a starring role on the cheesy TV hit Fantasy Island. On the other end of the seriousness spectrum, Dornan appeared in the November film A Private War, about war correspondent Marie Colvin. Down the road, keep an eye out on streaming services or DVD queues for Dornan in the RTÉ mini-series Death and Nightingales, based on Irish writer Eugene McCabe’s novel.  Set during the notorious Fenian dynamite campaign of the 1880s, Dornan plays a charming young man who crosses paths with a sheltered Irish girl who is looking to break free from her oppressive stepfather. Dornan’s co-star, Wexford native Ann Skelly, has been earning rave reviews of her own, and was recently dubbed “a rising star you’ll want to keep an eye on,” by Bustle.com. ♦