Emmy Contenders: ‘The Fall’s’ Jamie Dornan found his inner stalker for some perspective

Jamie Dornan, who plays stealthy serial killer on the Netflix crime drama “The Fall,” took extra (maybe, borderline illegal) steps in getting into the mindset of the tortured persona.

The 32-year-old Irish actor dropped by the Times on Monday for a live chat, and he found himself reluctantly revealing a tactic he used to better understand Paul Spector, the husband and father who moonlights as a psychopath serial killer with a fetish for tying up his victims before killing them.

“The first series, I did do a couple of things to try to get inside [his mind]. On the tube, which is our underground system” — Dornan began with his anecdote before stopping himself.

“Can we get arrested for this? Hold on ... this is a really bad reveal: I, like, followed a woman off the train one day to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that.”

Dornan said he kept his distance from his target, and once she reached her stop, lurked behind her for a couple of blocks. And the resulting feeling was one that helped understand Spector’s compulsion on some level.

“It felt kind of exciting, in a really sort of dirty way,” he added. “I’m sort of not proud of myself. But I do honestly think I learned something from it, because I’ve obviously never done any of that. It was intriguing and interesting to enter that process of ‘what are you following her for?’ and ‘what are you trying to find out?”

Dornan, who these days is probably best known for his role as kinky billionaire Christian Grey in the big-screen adaptation of “50 Shades of Grey,” also weighed in on the relationship between his character and that of Gillian Anderson’s police detective persona, as well as his finding out Madonna binges on the show — and so much more.

Check out the video above to hear what else he had to say.

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