While screenwriter Kelly Marcel is touting  Fifty Shades of Grey headliner Jamie Dornan as a potential Oscar contender for his turn as kinky S&M-loving billionaire Christian Grey…buzz around the studio commissary is that the chemistry is lacking between the two leads Dornan and Dakota Johnson who plays naive college student, Anastasia Steele. If the trailer, that I recently saw in the cinema, is anything to go by….I must agree.

Fifty Shades of Grey stars, Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson

Could this be the reason why, eight months after the film apparently wrapped…Dornan and Johnson are back on the set to re-shoot some of the film’s ‘vital moments’? Which obviously translates to the steamy, naughty, bind-me-with-your-designer-tie bits….

US Weekly is reporting that producers didn’t feel the existing footage was “passionate” enough and that leading lady Johnson needed to sex it up a bit. From what I know of this novel that can’t be hard to do. But hey, this is a two-way street. What about her leading man? What’s his part in the chemistry quid-pro-quo?

This is all easier said than done. Chemistry is not something you can write into a story. It’s not something you can direct out of your actors.  It’s either there or it’s not.  And when it IS (or isn’t, as it were) the dynamic that translates on screen is palpable…as was the case with the recent wedding episode of “Outlander” on Starz.

Outlander stars, Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe…HOT! I felt like a voyeur peeking in on someone’s wedding night!

When 10th Doctor David Tennant kissed Madame de Pompadour in “The Girl in The Fireplace” they lit up the screen with so much heat I just KNEW they were into each other. I blushed when I watched that kiss…and they were fully clothed! (Naturally like any self-respecting fangirl …I Googled them together and found out that they did, in fact, date…)

The Kiss felt around the Whoniverse!

I still blush watching this kiss…

And, am I the only one that remembers the way Marcia Brady used to look at Greg? And they were supposed to be siblings! But that chemistry resonated even to ME, as a little girl! But, I digress…

Perhaps the issue isn’t necessarily with the chemistry as much as it is with the casting. Fifty Shades has definitely had its share of casting challenges along the way, especially after original Christian Grey, Sons of Anarchy hunk, Charlie Hunnam ankled the project citing ‘scheduling’ issues, although some wondered if it wasn’t the media circus that would surround this movie and questions about the ‘direction’ the film was headed. Still, I thought Hunnam seemed to lend Grey the sexually dangerous element needed in this character.

Hunnam’s Grey might have had more of a dangerously sexy edge.

With a gazillion fans around the world, the film adaptation of E.L James best-selling novel has a lot to live up to. Maybe it’s more than any actor can take on…having to meet the imagined fantasies of all those sexually bored housewives. (And don’t catch me out…it’s been described as ‘mommy porn’ by most of my mommy-friends!) It might be a no-win situation which is perhaps why Dornan has already intimated that he’s not interested in a Grey sequel claiming, for one, that he was absolutely sick of doing the nude scenes.

Take a look at the trailer here:

For someone who has never read the books, even I know what the allure of this movie is all about.  To me the trailer looked more bad soft-porn than exciting sexual thriller. Perhaps they’ll get it right the second time around.

Lady Anglophile…watching “The Girl In The Fireplace” for the 102nd time…..