YOU may not recognize Jamie Dornan’s face, but his butt might look familiar.
“That was my bum,” Dornan proudly says of his 2004 Calvin Klein jeans billboard, which was dismantled from Houston Street following public outcry over the image of model Natalia Vodianova biting his ass (not to be confused with the most recent orgasmic Calvin Klein jeans ad pulled from Lafayette Street).
Jamie’s face and fanny have made the 27-year-old a wonder boy of sorts; he’s launched a thousand ad campaigns, including his latest for CK Free, CK jeans and Calvin Klein underwear, in which he’s writhing around — half-clad and soaking wet — with Eva Mendes.
Tough life, huh?
With the swagger of a young Jude Law, a natural self-effacing London charm and subtle Northern Irish drawl, Dornan’s also charmed a slew of starlets — he’s been linked to actresses such as Keira Knightley, Mischa Barton and Sienna Miller — and flirted with the silver screen, most notably as the rogue Swede in “Marie Antoinette.”
And despite seven years of vamping for the camera, Dornan seems to be in deep denial about his burgeoning male-supermodel-dom.
“I have no interest in being a model; I don’t consider myself a model in any way,” says the Belfast-born, 5-foot-11 hunk who just spent three days in Milan during Men’s Fashion Week “being” and doing model-like things (a sexy 12-page Korean Elle photo shoot, launching CK Free, being dressed every day by the Calvin Klein team, sitting front row at the Calvin Klein fashion show, and dining and sipping cocktails and champagne with the world’s top men’s fashion editors).
“I’ve never done a catwalk. I went to Milan [in 2002] to do the runways, and I didn’t get any,” says Dornan. “I just got really badly bitten by mosquitoes.”
Alas, even bugs find him irresistible.
“I wanted to be an actor, and this happened,” he adds. “Acting is still very much my focus, but there is quite a massive stigma attached to someone who’s modeled as much [as I have].”
Despite his lucrative and exclusive contract with Calvin Klein, Dornan takes this struggling-actor thing so seriously that, discontent with his life of relative luxury in a two-bedroom West London flat, he went and got himself a roommate.
“I’m single, so I like the idea of going home and knowing someone’s going to be there,” says Dornan of rooming with a friend.
A chiseled, oft-lathered-up model with an accent who wants someone to come home to? The line forms here, ladies.