Does Jamie Dornan really collect rocks that look like potatoes?
During his hosting gig on Saturday Night Live UK this weekend, Northern Irish actor Jamie Dornan made a surprising confession.
“I’m not just a sex symbol who looks sexy in everything he does,” the Fifty Shades of Grey star said in his opening monologue. “I am also a guy who collects rocks that look like potatoes.” A table was pushed onto the stage, and on it were what were alleged to be five rocks of different shapes resting on tiny plinths and, in one case, a velvet cushion. They looked exactly like potatoes.
The inevitable question that this provoked was, does Dornan actually collect spud-shaped stones in his free time? It’s a weirdly specific claim, although the show has already shown a proclivity for weirdly specific comedic bits after just two episodes. For example, elsewhere in the show this week, cast members Larry Dean and Jack Shep play family members who are filming a promotional video for their baked bean pop-up restaurant and are having to repeatedly apologise for the fact that their grandmother is in prison for “injecting a bus full of children with Hepatitis C”. Weirdly specific.
It would not be completely out of the realm of possibility, then, for the Dornan potato bit to be an elaborate gag, but he does a good job of convincing us otherwise. “This isn’t a joke,” he insists. “God knows I wish it was.” He then suggests that the audience Google “Jamie Dornan potato rocks” to see that he is, in fact, telling the truth. Like most people, no doubt, I did this immediately. Unfortunately, however, the minute the episode was live, the internet was flooded with mentions of Dornan and his potato rocks, but all of them were related to the SNL episode. Back to square one.
Despite a history of strange revelations on talk shows (the time he pooed in the bath while sleepwalking as an 11-year-old, his self-consciousness about his natural walking style, the time he was hazed by two children because of his hat, to name a few), Dornan has never, as far as the internet is concerned, publicly revealed a rock-collecting habit until now.
Perhaps he simply has too many unlikely personal anecdotes to share and just never got around to it, or perhaps it was simply the SNL writers capitalising on his history of oversharing embarrassing stories on talk shows and running with it. My guess is the latter, and, in this vacuum of verifiable rock-based evidence, I will tell you why.
Those ‘rocks’ looked like nothing that occurs in nature. I’ve done the research, and while there is a specific type of quartz nodule called a Dulcote Agate found in the Mendip Hills in Somerset that is often referred to as a “potato stone”, it looks nothing like the potato lookalikes that Dornan showed off. Dulcote Agates are much lumpier, with a matte surface, and often have streaks of red on their surfaces.
They also feature stunning geode interiors that no one in their right mind would leave uncovered. If you found a Mendip potato stone, you would crack it open, first thing – the ones that made an appearance on SNL were smooth, with the slight crinkling that you would expect from the skin of potatoes, not the surface of rocks.
Making a brief appearance in the audience, actor Chris O’Dowd revealed that he had swapped one of the stones on the table with an actual potato, and no one could tell the difference… Whether any of the supposed stones on the table were actually stones is unclear, one of them – the one Dornan kisses at one point – looks like it could be a generic rock, while some of the others look like they must be root vegetables.
Given that no one with knowledge on the matter has revealed the truth, it seems inevitable that Dornan will be asked about this pretty regularly in future talk show appearances. My hope is that this will become the enjoyable version of that exhausting Timothée Chalamet saga in which the Oscar hopeful refused to confirm or deny whether he was the Scouse rapper EsDeeKid. Does Jamie Dornan collect rocks? Who knows? Keep us guessing! Let’s hope we spend years debating it and never find out. There is so little mystery in the world, and this one has the rare distinction of being completely harmless and downright charming.
