Jamie Dornan once kissed a horse on TV set despite being highly allergic

Los Angeles, Dec 17 (IANS) ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ star Jaime Dornan recalled how his “lips blew up” after kissing a horse on a TV set.

While appearing on The Graham Norton Show, the Irish actor, regaled the audience with a hilarious story about how he once kissed a horse on a TV set despite being “highly allergic” to the animal.

“I like them as a species, I just can’t get close,” Dornan said, before explaining that he made the grievous error of locking lips with the horse despite previously running into trouble with a horse while filming ‘Marie Antoinette’, his first ever acting role, back in 2006, people.com.

“My character (Count Axel Fersen) pretty much has to spend the whole movie on a horse,” he recounted.

“And I forgot I hadn’t been around horses for a long time.”

To get ready for filming, he underwent two weeks of riding training outside Paris.

“So I’m trotting around this place … and in the back, one of the runner’s faces just looked (shocked),” he said of the crew member’s reaction to his appearance.

“I was itchy, and my whole face had become a giant hive. I had to get EpiPens. Then they almost couldn’t insure me to do the movie.”

To continue the job, he needed to be medicated whenever he was near a horse.

“So if you see me on a horse, I’m very heavily medicated,” he joked.

Despite this extreme allergic reaction, Dornan went on to work with horses again in the 2012 historical drama New Worlds. It seems the Fifty Shades of Grey actor developed quite an affinity for his assigned horse on the series’ set.

“I really liked the horse I had. And I thought, ‘It’s the final day. You know what? I love this horse.’ So I gave her a kiss on the lips,” he said, prompting Norton, 60, to jokingly interject, “What medication were you on?”

Dornan continued his story: “I went, ‘You know what, we’re nearly over. I have half a day left.’ The horse was picture wrapped. So I gave it a kiss.”

“And then my lips absolutely blew up,” he recounted.

“And we couldn’t shoot the rest of the day.”

—IANS

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