I thought that we could just be normal people and have a dinner/hang sesh together.” Dakota Johnson is only trying to make plans for a meal, but inadvertently defines what makes her such a singular actress. As one of her best friends tells me, “She is a very real person in an unreal world,” refreshingly without artifice.
One would assume it would be the opposite for the daughter of Hollywood royalty (her mother is Melanie Griffith, her father Don Johnson), but instead she is frank and disarmingly honest. Today, she is also not surrounded by PRs, agents and handlers. Her “people” must have a lot of trust that she will be a politically correct angel and not speak out of line.
“I’m recalcitrant, so they gave up on me,” she fires back, with a wry smile, hair pulled back into a messy chignon, her face fresh and devoid of make-up. And if a question comes up she doesn’t like? She laughs and responds: “I’ll just be, ‘I’m not going to answer that, motherfucker!'”
It’s the first chilly day of winter and we’re in a hired car driving down the West Side Highway on the way to her favourite restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, the quaintly chic Café Cluny. Through the window we can see the sun setting, bathing Jersey City in molten pink and yellow. Dakota takes a call from her grandmother, also an actress, the eternal Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren. “Oh hi, Mormor!” Dakota says warmly (the term means granny in Swedish).
The famous shot of Hedren is of her with blonde hair swept back but askew, swatting off crows pecking at her face in Hitchcock’s 1963 classic The Birds. For her mother, Melanie Griffith, it’s probably the shot of her vacuuming topless in 1988’s Working Girl, Hollywood’s rom-com female spin on Wall Street-era excess. For Dakota, it’s getting spanked as the submissive Anastasia, the culmination of the cardigan-clad frump emerging from the chrysalis as a submissive sexpot in last year’s Fifty Shades of Grey.
“I’m proud of Fifty,” Dakota declares resignedly, still flummoxed that people assume she wouldn’t be. “I don’t need to distance myself from that. The more work I do, the more the general public sees the different things I can do. Do I think it opened doors? Yeah. More people know my name.”
She demonstrated her broader scope in last year’s Black Mass, opposite Johnny Depp. (Her grandmother was thrilled because one of her many house cats is named “Johnny Depp”.) Dakota played ruthless gangster Whitey Bulger’s mistress, a haggard, broken mother with a dying child, and spoke in a harsh Boston accent. “I worked with a dialect coach before filming,” she recalls, “and then did a lot of eavesdropping in coffee shops.” Her performance greatly outweighed her screen time (there are murmurings of a best supporting actress Oscar nod). Of her rough appearance she thinks, “In my real life, I don’t look pretty all the time. Nobody does. I love films that are honest… That’s the thing that turns me on.”
While this was just a small role, her latest starring vehicle, released this February, is another volteface after Fifty Shades – the anti-romantic comedy How To Be Single. It is being pitched as the next Bridesmaids-style comedy hit.
The film is co-written and produced by one of Dakota’s close friends, Dana Fox. They first met on the set of the short-lived sitcom Ben and Kate, with 21-year-old Dakota as the titular single mother with a five-year-old daughter. Fox was surprised at how down-to-earth the actress was, given her background and vocation. Dakota was at the hospital when Fox had her first child (and watched the circumcision). “Once you have that closeness with her,” Fox adds, “she is not bullshitting!” Of her talents, she continues: “She is not afraid to try weird stuff, of swinging and missing. Sometimes it’s a miss, but when she hits, she really hits.”
