GETTING ‘alone’ time with Fifty Shades star Dakota Johnson is proving as easy as persuading Christian Grey to hang up his handcuffs. Today, a four-strong entourage is occupying the room with us, as well as director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), who is having a heated phone conversation in Italian.
As Johnson and I sit, politely, waiting for him to finish, I compliment her on her dress, a low V-cut, jet-black number from Proenza. Lovely dress, I say. It’s very, erm… ‘Witchy?’ she finishes with a bright smile, smoothing down her long, dark hair, newly cut with a blunt fringe.
It’s a good look for promoting Suspiria, a new art-house horror movie Johnson recently described to W magazine as ‘a crazy, crazy film… a total mind f***.’ Which, having seen Suspiria, seems pretty accurate. Though today she chooses ‘intricate’ to describe it, possibly because Guadagnino, who she seems in awe of, allowing him to dominate our interview (so we’ve cut him out and put him in his own box, below), is sat right next to her.
Either way, aside from the female nudity and a climactic scene in a red dungeon, it’s a world away from the Fifty Shades trilogy, the ‘mummy porn’ blockbusters based on EL James’s bestsellers, which made Johnson a star. ‘They are very different films,’ she summarises.
Suspiria is a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 cult classic. It’s about an aspiring young dancer from Nowheresville America (Johnson) who enters a creepy Berlin dance academy run by Tilda Swinton and, it turns out, a coven of witches. It seems like dark material for a 29-year-old who happily tells me her favourite films are still The Wizard Of Oz, Home Alone and Mary Poppins.
‘I was very interested in a young woman who comes from an extremely sheltered, cut-off environment, who gets to her dream place by pure willpower,’ says Johnson. ‘I wanted to make a movie about dance and about motherhood and manipulation and about possession and about psycho-bending situations. I also just wanted to work again with Luca [with whom she made 2015’s A Bigger Splash].’ That’s a lot of boxes ticked, then.
Johnson’s own mother is Melanie Griffith, best known for her 1988 Oscar-nominated turn in Working Girl. Her dad is Don Johnson, her grandmother is Tippi Hedren (who starred in Hitchcock’s The Birds) and her debut came in 1999’s Crazy In Alabama, directed by her stepfather, Antonio Banderas. It’s fair to say she grew up in the limelight — yet Johnson says every job makes her anxious. Suspiria was ‘challenging and terrifying’ as it involved playing a dancer. ‘I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to pull that off,’ she adds.
As a result Johnson did something of a Natalie-Portman-in-Black-Swan-style transformation. A year and a half before shooting Suspiria, she embarked on a self-instigated course of hardcore dance training to give her body a ‘more sinewy, more long and lean’ look. If the physical demands were great — during the shoot she got cuts and bruises and threw her back out so painfully it spasmed into her neck — the psychological toll was even greater.
‘I woke up feeling sick to my stomach with the nightmares,’ she says. ‘It was crazy. I had dreams I didn’t even know were possible.’
Even so, she insists, she ‘loved everything about’ Suspiria as a project. ‘The world I create with Luca is so special to me. I get to understand more about myself and learn so much — it is such a gift. Like — this is my job,’ she exclaims, wide-eyed, as her people hover around ready to swoop her away to the next interview. ‘I get to have the most fun and feel totally frightened and feel like I am out of my league and then feel that I am in my league and I have finally found my people.’
As Dorothy would say, ‘There’s no place like home’.
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