This actors' squad sounds like fifty shades of awesome!
Around 2009, before he was famous, Jamie Dornan was roommates with fellow then-struggling actor Eddie Redmayne in Los Angeles. The Northern Irish Belfast star and his English roommate, Redmayne, now 40, hung out regularly with Andrew Garfield, 38, and Robert Pattinson, 35, who were both raised in the U.K. and were also in the early days of their acting careers.
"Garfield and Robert were always around, and Charlie Cox," Dornan, 39, said on SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show in a remote interview posted Tuesday, Jan. 25. "I mean, there's loads of us who actually ended up going on to do pretty well for ourselves. But at the time we, we weren't. We were pretty, yeah, pretty, pretty messy."
"It's now weird to think about it," he continued. "Well, particularly for Eddie and I who lived together, and Eddie's been one of my best mates for a long time, and now we've got, you know, five kids between us and we're very much more sort of together people and stable people, probably. But we had a lot of fun then."
Dornan said that he and his fellow actors "were never competitive with each other" despite being "up for the same stuff a lot of the time." He added, "They're all really great guys and really good actors. It's cool that it kind of all happened for us, in a way."
In an interview on The Late Late Show With James Corden in November, Dornan, who was promoting Belfast on the program, said that although the group did compete for the same roles, they would also help each other prep for auditions and make self tapes.
Garfield, who appeared with Dornan on The Late Late Show to promote his latest film project—the lead role in Tick, Tick... Boom!, talked about how the actors struggled financially together as they built their careers. He said that they "were the kind of guys who would go to the Standard Hotel on Sunset Boulevard to play Ping-Pong and order one cocktail between us because we couldn't afford any more," adding, "And we would spend six or seven hours."
Dornan said, "But you had to order food or they would kick you out. So we'd order like, a burger and have like, a bite each."
Redmayne, who won an Oscar in 2015 for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, has also spoken about his experience living with Dornan and auditioning as a struggling actors.
"It was great in a sense that you've got to try everything and fail hard," he told his friend during a recent video chat for Variety, "but your mates were there to kind of pick you up afterwards."