Jamie Dornan "hid" in the country after reviews for 'Fifty Shades of Grey' came out.

The 41-year-old actor faced "ridicule" for the first time in his career when the first film in the erotic rom-com franchise - which was based on the books by E. L. James - hit screens in 2015, and he decided to keep a low profile and not read anything.

He told Radio 4's 'Desert Island Discs': "I think I hid.

"I am coming off the back of career-altering reviews for 'The Fall' to just ridicule, almost."

The flick's director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, 56, and her actor husband, Aaron, 33, let Dornan and his family stay at their country abode.

He continued: "They let us have their place in the country and we sort of hid there for a while and just shut ourselves from the world a bit and then sort of came out the other side."

However, he couldn't hide forever, as he had two more films to film in the trilogy, in which he portrayed sadist Christian Grey alongside Dakota Johnson, 34, as Anastasia Steele, the literature student who becomes his lover.

He said: "It [the film] made so much money that two or three were like greenlit overnight. It was a strange thing, because then you are like, there is a bit of ridicule here and I'm now contractually doing two more of them and knowing that there would be more of that damnation to come."

The trilogy - completed by 2017's 'Fifty Shades Darker' and 2018's 'Fifty Shades Freed' - made a whopping $1.32 billion at the box office, the seventh highest-grossing R-rated franchise of all time, despite the negative reviews.

The 'Tourist' star's turn as kink-obsessed billionaire Grey also earned him his first Golden Raspberry award for Worst Actor in 2015.

Slamming his critics, Dornan previously told Radio Times magazine: “I knew there was going to be a lot of hostility about the project because there was a lot of hostility around the books, and a lot of it is literary snobbery. People like to (criticise)… very successful things: if you have something that’s hugely successful and sold as many copies as those books did, while critics didn’t like them.

“Oxbridge-educated critics who think they are the most important people in the world… I’m somebody who seeks out challenges.

“Choosing this for a career and dealing with all the (muck) that comes with it?

“If you can ride through all that, it probably makes you more resilient.

“I don’t really sweat the small stuff much because I’ve had big stuff happen that’s bad.”