Dakota Johnson isn’t very online, but she’s sometimes tempted.
She says, grinning. She’s probably right. Johnson has just wrapped a two-week press tour for Marvel’s Madame Web that was variously called “chaotic,” “unhinged,” and “refreshingly honest.” She has the kind of virality that can’t be studied — and to be clear, it’s not. “I live way out by the beach, out in Malibu,” she says of her personal life with her partner, Coldplay’s Chris Martin. “I need to be in nature. I can be out at my house and not see or speak to another human for days on end, and I feel wonderful.”
We’re here to discuss what Johnson did on some of those days at her house: read. On March 1, she launched her very own book club inspired by the work she does hunting for IP for TeaTime Pictures, the production company she co-founded with former Netflix development executive Ro Donnelly. “There are a lot of people who do things like I do and they have book clubs, and I was always like, Oh, the way that I read books, it’s so different,” she says. “I want to fall down the rabbit hole every time I read… to invest in the book, invest in the language, invest in the references. Like, Oh, what is that piece of art she’s talking about? Who’s that musician?”
“I occasionally think of something or say something that I feel would be really great on Twitter”
I’m sitting with the 34-year-old actor at a restaurant on the beach in Santa Monica, California, near where she went to high school. (“Before that, I was all over the place with my parents,” she says, nodding to the acting careers of her mother, Melanie Griffith, and father, Don Johnson.) She looks polished, with Jessica McCormack heart-shaped diamond earrings and her impossibly long hair, due to be cut tomorrow, covering a striped sweater. Her jeans are high-waisted because she’s a millennial, not Gen Z, though she doesn’t want to get into that after her last comments on the topic went viral. She’s already predicting the potential aftermath of today’s conversation. “Like, ‘Dakota Johnson Breaks Her Silence On Madame Web’s F*cking Box Office Failure,’” she says, laughing. “It’s like, ‘No, I’m not breaking any silence. I’m just talking.’”
Part of the appeal of books is that she doesn’t have to engage in any of that nonsense. “TeaTime and I have an Instagram channel where you can have a chat with whoever signs up, and every few days we’ll be releasing a deep dive as we read along together,” she says. This might include a playlist the author made or information about their references. The first book, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, is a startling novel about a woman who believes she is an alien. It’s an interesting choice — literary, but accessible; concrete, but ambiguous. It feels fitting. “I don’t know if I’m from anywhere or I belong anywhere,” Johnson says when I ask her later. “So, yes, I do relate to the alien.”
I read Beautyland in 48 hours and was so distracted by the ending that I left my passport on the plane. Why did you want to start with that book?
Well, I don’t want to give too much away, but this is a book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life. It feels like we’re setting the bar so high, which I am proud of. Our book club is literary fiction. It’s not beach reads. It’s not silly. It’s not all female authors, but it is female-forward, and it’s a lot of first-time novelists.
Will the approach itself be different to other clubs?
I’ve found in book clubs that you’re just kind of on your own. You watch someone like me have a conversation with the author, but I don’t feel invested in that. I’m not very good at Instagram and I am constantly trying to figure it out, but the more I’ve learned and seen, something like this is really needed. People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things rather than talking about what f*cking face serum they’re using and thinking that that’s the most important thing in the world. And… honestly I love a face serum. [Laughs.] But I also want to talk about this world that this incredible woman created.
