Jamie Dornan is not an elf

One of my biggest pop culture personality flaws is that I want nothing to do with The Lord of the Rings. If I read the books as a kid I don’t remember them. And I found the movies boring. Which means I know next to nothing about the story.

The only key words I can identify from LOTR are: Gollum, Sam, hobbits, and elves. Maybe wizard? In my mind, everyone in The Lord of the Rings is one of those three, a hobbit, an elf, or a wizard. Which is why I just asked Google this question: is Aragorn an elf? The answer I took away from my ten seconds of internet research is… no but maybe a little. Something something perhaps there’s a bit of elf in his bloodline? This is all I need, please do not send me pages and pages of Reddit threads where Stephen Colbert gives lectures about Aragon’s elf ancestry under a pseudonym. For the purposes of this story, what I required is a simple sentence to work as a title for a post about Jamie Dornan, who is playing Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis, which is currently in production and due for release next Christmas.

Jamie’s casting was confirmed months ago but he is talking about it for the first time. And this I understand – the fandom’s devotion to Viggo Mortensen in the role and of course the pressure of having to follow that performance.

In an interview with L’Officiel, Jamie says that:

Jamie Dornan on playing Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum:

"There's pressure when you're trying to follow in those footsteps. I've been asked to play a super-iconic role, and I'll do my best. But for me, Aragorn will always be just Viggo. His performance is… pic.twitter.com/7uXHA40vhX

— The Mellon Heads - LOTR Podcast (@mellon_heads) October 20, 2026

It’s been a quiet couple of years for Jamie, and maybe it needed to be. His run with Fifty Shades ended in 2018, probably an abnormal phase in his career, and it’s typical for stars to dial it back after that kind of heatscore experience.

LOTR, though, is a whole other level of heatscore. These are hardcore nerds who care deeply about their sh-t. It’s kinda fascinating though to think that being Christian Grey might have prepared him for it, LOLOLOLOL.

On a purely superficial note, to me he is hotter now than he was as Christian Grey… but maybe it’s not that superficial? Like, yes, I’m sure for those who are deeply invested in all the LOTR lore that Viggo’s performance was first class but also? Let’s not pretend that the way he looked as Aragorn didn't make people horny. Jamie is now 44, just a couple of years younger than Viggo when he was making those movies. He’s more grizzled, maybe even a little more weary…and that works for this non-elf character who, I think?, does war things. It works for me, especially in this video. You can’t tell me he’s not sexy here.

That’s the current end of the two Jamie Dornan is sexy bookmarks for me, skipping over the Fifty Shades era entirely, but beginning over 20 years ago, when I first met knew him as Keira Knightley’s boyfriend. This was a very specific early-2000s London pop culture obsession that appealed to the gossips who were around at the time.

Jamie of course has long been married to Amelia Warner, with whom he shares three children, despite the batsh-t conspiracy theories about him and Dakota Johnson that Fifty-hards cling to like Robsten truthers. Fun fact – before Jamie, Amelia was briefly (but not legally) married to Colin Farrell. TikTok will discover all of this in 12 months.