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"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 Cafe 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 blond: Tippi Hedren. ‘Oh hi, Monnor!” 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. But Johnson refuses to be frozen in amber as Anastasia (despite having signed up for both sequels). Alongside upcoming lead roles in potential blockbusters. there are also strikingly good support roles in smaller, artier films, all of which will help prove that she is an actress with depth as well as staying power. “The size of a role doesn't matter to me.” she insists. “I don't need to be the lead of a movie in order to want to do it. I have to love the character.” She’s never had an acting lesson and doesn't plan to. “I always wanted to make movies," she continues. “It made sense. I watched my parents do it. I grew up on set; it was magical. There was no Plan B. It's mostly instinctual. I don't have a process.”
What was most shocking about Fifty Shades: was the lack of sex in it but there is plenty of high-camp comedy. It was deliciously awful and raked in $5 70 million. “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 this February is another volteface after Fifty Shades - the anti-romantic comedy How To Be Single. It is being pitched as the next Bridesmaids comedy hit. “I play the ‘straight man'," says Dakota, who stars alongside Rebel Wilson as her best friend. “Our dynamic weirdly reminded me of Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in Ab! Fab - an unexpected kind of comedy duo,” thinks Wilson, calling from LA. “She's a natural actress. As the lead she makes it a much more interesting, cooler movie." 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 & 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 stufl; of swinging and missing. Sometimes it's a miss, but when she hits, she really hits.”
Arriving finally at the restaurant. Dakota takes off her wool Gucci overcoat. A green-and-red bird in flight, iridescent with silvered thread, is intricately embroidered on the back. “I’m a big fan of Alessandro Michele,” she enthuses of the label's creative director. “He's insanely talented." Dakota was front row at Gucci last season and sat next to Michele at the official after-show dinner. She seems to have become the brand's muse and has been wearing it to events. She slips into a booth and orders salmon with hearts of palm and a peppermint tea. She is naturally soft-spoken and the group of boisterous women at an adjacent table nearly drowns out our conversation. But Dakota's lack of volume doesn't connote shyness but seems a way of not drawing attention to herself. She exudes quiet confidence, is chatty and open, but also savvy and quick to a schoolmarm glare. She's grown up in a media bubble and knows how to navigate it. She is happy to talk about New York, a city she has fallen in love with after moving here last March.
"I stupidly arrived a few weeks after Fifty came out,” she says. ‘I had finished the press tour and I walked into an empty apartment in a city that I had just moved to. My family wasn't here; I didn't have a couch, a bed or anything. It would have been nice to go home to an environment that l was comfortable with. But it was good at the same time, I had to adjust quickly and affirm myself.” At times, looking at her can be uncanny. When she tilts her head to one angle, she looks like Melanie Griflith, the epitome of round-faced all-American beauty. But when she turns to look for the waitress she resembles her grandmother. a more patrician European allure.
“My grandmother is one of the most extraordinary women in the world,” she says admiringly. “She's more quick-witted and wise than anyone I know." The 85-year-old Hedren is an animal activist and has a reserve for tigers and lions at her ranch near Los Angeles. Dakota grins:"She still walks around the reserve at night and checks the tigers." Dakota grew up in Woody Creek, Colorado, with Griffith and Johnson. “I worked at the local store and did odd jobs like wash horses and babysit," she says. When her parents split up in 1996, she divided her time between Colorado. where her father remained, and LA with her mother and new stepfather, actor Antonio Banderas. (Dakota speaks fluent Spanish.) Griflith and Banderas divorced in 2014, but the family dynamic, although extended, seems altogether amicable. She's just been out vintage shopping in the East Village with her half-sister Stella Banderas, a New York University student. Growing up, she says her famous family seemed more normal in LA, even if it presented its challenges elsewhere: “My parents' friends had children and we understood each other's lives. But then you would go to a school where people don't get that, but..." She trails off. "The way I grew up is the way I grew up. I didn't know different. In LA there's a wider awareness of celebrity families."
Dakota is close to her mother and they speak frequently. The public's peephole view into their relationship is myopic - a viral, awkward, red- carpet moment caught on camera before last year's Oscars where Dakota was a presenter. She was mortified when Griffith said she had never seen nor would see Fifty Shades. “I don't want to talk about that because it's fucking boring," Dakota says. “That was a moment between a mother and daughter that was completely blown out of proportion by the media.” Johnson's initial deal for Fifty Shades included two sequels, and Fifty Shades Darker is due next year.
We talk more about movies, and she says the women who most inspire her are Patti Smith (she has Smith's poetry book Witt, on her nightstand, and her reading tastes range from biography to sci-fl) and Gena Rowlands, one of the most gifted actresses America has produced. I wonder aloud why she's never in any new films. “Why are a lot of women not in movies?” Dakota asks. Her placid demeanour breaks and she raises her voice. “Why isn't my mother in movies? She's an extraordinary actress! Why isn’t my grandmother in movies? This industry is fucking brutal. No matter how tough you are, sometimes there's the feeling of not being wanted. It's absurd and cut-throat.”
She sips her tea and adds, more quietly, “Whenever l have downtime, I'm unsure that I will ever work again. I don't know what it is, but it's a definite thing that happens to me.” There seems to be little worry about that, however. Released the same month as How To Be Single is a very different film. A Bigger Splash is set on a picturesque Italian island, and is a moody drama that veers into dark waters. Alongside Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes, Dakota plays Penelope, a sullen young siren. “She's kind of a budding psychopath playing with relationships," Dakota says of her role. “but it goes too far and ultimately she is hurting herself." The film is as much about what is unsaid as said (Penelope is a sullen and withdrawn sylph, Swinton's character is actually mute). The director, Luca Guadagnino (whose last film was I Am Love), says he needed someone “who could bring intelligence - that's Dakota.” He liked working with Johnson so much - and her chemistry with Swinton - that he paired them again in his upcoming horror film Suspiria. “She is motivated by challenging herself to explore territories that are complex. She doesn't like the short way.”
With all these projects afoot. her presence on the red carpet this year is again guaranteed. Although her day outfits remain fairly low-key - under the Gucci coat she's wearing a demure black James Pearse T-shirt dress and loafers (she can’t remember the brand and leans over and speaks into the recorder intercom-style, “Loafers. She wore cool loafers") - her wardrobe has certainly upgraded. She works with stylist Kate Young for events. having met through mutual friends such as Karen Elson and musician/designer Chase Cohl. “She's always sexy. Even if you put her in something unsexy, she stays sexy. But if you told her that. she’d make a frumpy body shape and walk around like a troll and make you laugh,‘ Young says of her friend. “And she's kind of a rocker girl," she continues. “Her boyfriend is in a band. I don't want her to be so polished when she's on a red carpet that there's no relation to that.” Dakota has often been shot by paparazzi with the musician Matthew Hitt of the Drowners (including holding hands with him on the street the day after saying she was single on the American talk show Ellen).
“I know Dakota through one of my best friends who is dating her," says Alexa Chung. “She has an incredibly quick wit and makes any event more fun. She seems as comfortable and graceful rolling down the red carpet as she is rolling through the door of an East Village rock bar." When the subject of romance comes up. Dakota’s normally expressive face turns blank. She pauses. “I don’t want to speak about my personal life," she intones clearly. “With an exclamation point!” she adds, more vigorously. “There should be an exclamation point. She is currently “geeked” on classic groups like Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds. She’s been listening to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's solo album Pacific Ocean Blue.
She texts herself the names of some records I recommend and shows me her phone. “All I do is send gifs to myself of people rolling their eyes," she says and scrolls though Judge Judy, Herman Munster, Harry Potter and Liz Lemon. She recently saw Tobias Jesso Jr. perform at the Music Hall of Williamsburg and goes to as many concerts as she can, usually via public transport. She finds subway rides can be trying. however. “People do this thing that makes me so mad,” Dakota says, with a look of panic on her face. “More than anything that could ever bother me is when people take my picture without asking or try to be sneaky about it. It's so invasive and makes me feel so vulnerable. I can’t do anything about it. I'm not about to go up to someone and be like, ‘Can you not?" She continues, “I'm not going to let it get in the way of my life. I can't be one of those people who is not in the world. because that's the way I get my inspiration and my ideas. I feel like I’m transported all the time by people on the street. If I overhear a conversation, whether it's sad or it's horrible. or someone is having a gleeful moment on the phone. I'm like, ah... I'm affected." Earlier that afternoon, on the Vogue shoot, she had seemed utterly at ease with her surroundings, immersed in the city pulsating around her. For the final shot she posed on the pavement on the edge of West Chelsea resplendent in an Alexander Wang slip dress and oversized trench (“Clothes 1 would actually wear,“ she grins amiably). seemingly unfazed by gruff New Yorkers brushing past her, hurrying home from the oflice. She is smiling despite the cold, while the Empire State Building looms majestic against the cerulean sky. There is a gust of wind and Dakota grabs on to her black hamburg so it doesn't blow away. The temperature continues to drop but her smile grows bigger. Dakota Johnson, it seems, is exactly where she wants to be.
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