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All actors have to start somewhere, and more often than not, they have to put in years of work before they have their big break. Eddie Redmayne and Jamie Dornan are two examples of this dynamic. Though they’ve both enjoyed successful careers over the past decade, they both had a long and winding road to get to the top of the Hollywood heap.

Eddie Redmayne and Jamie Dornan attend the W Magazine celebration of the 'Best Performances' Portfolio and The Golden Globes with Cadillac and Dom Perignon at Chateau Marmont on January 8, 2015 in Los Angeles, California | Donato Sardella/Getty Images for W Magazine
Eddie Redmayne and Jamie Dornan attend the W Magazine celebration of the ‘Best Performances’ Portfolio and The Golden Globes with Cadillac and Dom Perignon at Chateau Marmont on January 8, 2015 in Los Angeles, California | Donato Sardella/Getty Images for W Magazine

Eddie Redmayne and Jamie Dornan once lived together

Before they could conquer Hollywood, however, Redmayne and Dornan had to climb the Hollywood ladder first. Redmayne and Dornan caught up in a conversation for Variety‘s Actors on Actors series and reminisced on their lives at the time.

“We look better than we did when we met, probably, in many ways. Some pretty terrible hair going on,” Dornan told Redmayne. “I remember that it was 2009, because — let’s set the scene up a little bit. We weren’t working a great deal.”

“At all. At all,” Redmayne admitted.

“OK, we weren’t working at all,” Dornan conceded. “We’re going up for a lot of stuff in LA, a lot of the same stuff sometimes, which was depressing.”

Dornan revealed that they lived together “for about three months” and discussed what it was like sharing a space while they both struggled to get their acting careers off the ground. “There was so little to do if we didn’t have an audition,” he recalled. “The reason I remember it was one day we went to a Pottery Barn or something, and… we made some crockery. We made plates and clay pots, and I remember we wrote the names of all these actors who were our gang.”

Eddie Redmayne attends the Into Film Award 2019 at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on March 04, 2019 in London, England | Dave J. Hogan/Getty Images)
Eddie Redmayne attends the Into Film Award 2019 at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on March 04, 2019 in London, England | Dave J. Hogan/Getty Images)
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Eddie Redmayne and Jamie Dornan helped each other through hard times

Though it was a difficult time for both of them, they’re grateful that they had each other to get through it.

“I’m slightly embarrassed you’re putting that out into the public arena, given I used to tell my parents that I was going to LA in January to endlessly slave away to try to get work,” Redmayne sheepishly said of their handmade pottery. “I was always two hours early or an hour late to auditions, endlessly running these lines. But it was great in the sense that you got to try everything and fail hard.”

“Totally,” Dornan concurred. “There was just so much failure. I just remember your rental car — the foot area of the front passenger seat was a sea of failed audition sides. You were just shucking them down there after coming out of one of those auditions, going, ‘That’s another fail.'”

Ultimately, both Redmayne and Dornan are thankful for their trials and tribulations, and that they were by each other’s side through it all. “We’ve come a long way since those days,” Redmayne said. “I never take it for granted.”

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