Christian Grey's Going to the Congo

If you're Jamie Dornan, you're going to want to springboard off Fifty Shades of Grey and quick, lest your identifying parenthetical forever read "Christian Grey, enigmatic tier of silk scarves" — which is exactly what the actor has done, leveraging his Fifty Shades buzz into a hasty casting announcement. On Wednesday, Deadline reported that Dornan will star in The Siege of Jadotville , the story of 150 Irish UN peacekeepers in the Congo in 1961, who came under siege (surprise) from an army of over 3,000 local troops. The film is set to begin filming in 2015, the minute Dornan wraps up his mandatory press tour for Fifty Shades.

Whether or not you knew Dornan's name before two weeks ago, chances are, you haven't stopped hearing it pop up since, as everyone and their mother — possibly, especially their mother — has been flipping out about the new Fifty Shades of Grey trailer. Sure, the young and notably babely actor had a solid stint on Once Upon a Time, even a Sophia Coppola-directed debut in Marie Antoinette, but there's no question that Fifty Shades is his mainstream breakout performance, if only because it's so highly, even nervously, anticipated.

Indeed, judging by a sizable chunk of the online reaction, it seems that for many, waiting on the film's 2015 release date feels not unlike its heroine's trussed and blindfolded plight — curious, excited, but with a whole mess of confusion and complication muddled therein, which could all too easily turn sour if mishandled. Meanwhile, those who know unequivocally that BDSM is something they're into tend to view the book as anything from an embarrassing trifle to a problematic stereotype, while on the opposite end of the spectrum, those who decry the pornographizing of our culture are quite simply losing their shit. Plus, you've got to consider the impressive number of actors who turned the role down before him — including Ryan Gosling, who rejected the proposed trilogy outright, and Charlie Hunnam, who went so far as to accept the role before walking away because the script was unbearably bad.

Dornan's urgency to attach his name to a new project like Jadotville is understandable. With speculation already in place that he might be "the new Robert Pattinson" — apt, as Fifty Shades was originally a Twilight fanfic (which was itself a Mormon sex dream) — Dornan essentially has a roadmap of his career to come if this role sticks, and it ain't particularly pretty: lackluster dialogue, fangirls shrieking Beatles-style, mopey, frustrated interviews about being objectified and pigeon-holed, the whole bit.

Still, it's not like Pattinson's parable hasn't been well publicized, and that didn't stop Dornan from signing up for more of the same. In short, this, sir, is the Devil's bargain you made for fame and fortune — the rumpled, rope-bedecked bed in which you're now, unfortunately, going to have to lie.

So, while I'm sure Jadotville will be a fine film, I'm also pretty sure that when referring to Dornan, we'll all secretly be humming that new version of "Crazy in Love" in our heads for quite some time to come.