Jamie Dornan‘s got it pretty good these days: his popular Netflix series The Tourist is back for season two (you can catch up with a Netflix subscription) and we’re already craving a third season. But before he became a famous, Golden Globe-nominated actor known for works like Belfast, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, the Fifty Shades franchise and the chilling TV series The Fall, he was just another desperate performer struggling during Hollywood pilot season.
The Northern Irish actor detailed those dismal early days of his acting career during a recent appearance on First We Feast’s Hot Ones, relaying the most “soul-crushing memory” from that pilot-week era:
I remember getting in my car and I had like a pile and the whole sort of footwell in the passenger side was just tons of audition sides and scripts like this [foot-tall] height. And I was just seeing that pile and knowing that every one of those was a failure. [laughs] Just like the embodiment of failure from that pilot season. I was like, ‘No, this sucks.’
Pilot season was the annual pilgrimage to Los Angeles for actors like Dornan, as each summer, the major American broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC and so on—would receive hundreds of elevator pitches for new TV shows from writers and producers. Performers would audition and audition and audition again in the hopes that a pilot would get picked up for a full-season order on the TV premiere schedule. (All of this has, of course, changed in the streaming era, which is making things even harder for new actors.)
But competition is notoriously strong during the pilot process. (For example, TV legend has it that for the pilot of Friends, casting director Ellie Kanner reviewed more than 1,000 actors’ head shots for each of the six main roles.) So Dornan’s desperation and disappointment during the whole ordeal was pretty understandable, made hilariously worse by a surprise on his windshield:
I drove to a beach, if you take sunset the whole way down you end up on the edge of Malibu there. And I parked my car, and I sat at the beach and I like scream-cried for like a good 20 minutes, like, ‘Why do I put myself in this position every year?’ And I was feeling like life couldn’t get any worse, and I came back and I had a parking ticket [laughs]. It was a low for me.
Thankfully, things clearly worked out for the actor. Season one of The Tourist—which stars Dornan as the victim of a car crash who wakes up in a hospital in Australia with amnesia and has to reckon with the awful things he’s done—was the most-watched drama of 2022 in its native U.K., before getting even more viewers by streaming on Netflix.
And season two, which dropped on the streamer on Thursday, February 29, is currently enjoying a cool 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too shabby for a pilot season “failure” like Jamie Dornan. Here’s hoping that the show gets picked up for a third edition—we still have questions we want answered!
