Jamie Dornan Addresses “Imagine” Video Backlash, Concedes “Too Many Beautiful Trees”

Jamie Dornan Addresses “Imagine” Video Backlash, Concedes “Too Many Beautiful Trees”

One of the first great unifying experiences of this mass quarantine we’ve all been enduring was coming together to mock a video of celebrities including Will Ferrell, Amy Adams, and Kristen Wiig atrociously singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a literally and figuratively tone-deaf goodwill gesture organized and disseminated by Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot. The parodies were abundant, immediate, and deeply satisfying. The “Imagine” video sucked monumentally, and roasting it was sublime. So in a clueless, roundabout way, it achieved its goal of bringing the whole world together in this time of crisis.

Now one of the participating celebrities has finally weighed in. As Metro reports, Northern Irish model and Fifty Shades Of Grey star Jamie Dornan gave an interview to the Tea With Me podcast about his involvement, explaining that Wiig had asked him to sing in the clip on the set of the upcoming movie Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar. “Kristen texted, ‘Gal and I are trying to organize this thing to lift spirits. So I was like, ‘Of course I’ll do it.’ Then she texted days later saying, ‘Sorry.'” Dornan said he didn’t realize the reaction had been so negative because he isn’t on social media.

“[Gadot was] trying to do a good thing, I just got dragged along with it,” Dornan told podcaster Shane Todd. Dornan suggested that perhaps the public would have received the video more kindly if it had not been so obviously filmed from within a protective cocoon of lavish wealth: “I’ll tell you what the problem was. I literally did mine in the toilet of my house… Quite clearly, some people had escaped to their second home. There’s too much acreage in the background, too many beautiful trees swaying in the background, clearly in front of an ocean, that sort of craic. I was quite aware of that whenever I was doing it, to make it normal.”

I dunno Jamie, pretty sure people would have hated it even without the trees.

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