When Dakota Johnson left for Greece to film Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter, she wasn’t yet aware that a life-changing year awaited her. Months earlier, the prolific actress, still best known for leading the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, found passion projects including Lost Daughter being delayed due to COVID, while others were still gestating. By the time production on Lost Daughter finally commenced last September, on the Greek island of Spetses, Johnson’s schedule was stacked—she’d go on to work on three more projects back-to-back, without a break, over 12 full months.
Fortunately, she started the run with this one. As the 31-year-old Johnson tells me from a luxe condo in Telluride (where the film had just made its U.S. premiere), The Lost Daughter unlocked something in her—a new artistic path forward, a new window into her potential. Since Fifty Shades, she’s done the work in indies like A Bigger Splash and The Peanut Butter Falcon, but is currently receiving career-best notices for her tricky turn in Gyllenhaal’s uncompromising portrait of motherhood. Johnson plays Nina, a young mother on vacation with her family, and an enigmatic object of fascination to protagonist Leda (Olivia Colman). As Lost Daughter develops, Leda and Nina form a tenuous, shaky bond that hurtles toward a surprising, intense end.
I spoke with Johnson briefly on the day she’d flown in from Venice, where the movie world-premiered, at a packed filmmaker reception for Telluride—she still seemed to be processing the project’s sheer significance to her, especially as awards buzz began building for it and her performance. Coming here after a year of nonstop work, she’s at last in a position to reflect and think about what’s next. We sat down the next day for a conversation about all of that, and more.
Vanity Fair: One thing you’d mentioned to me yesterday was how meaningful of an experience it was making this movie. So I wanted to start with a big question: What does this project, this role, mean to you at this point in your career?
Dakota Johnson: Maggie allowed me the opportunity and gave me the guidance to go deeper into my artistry, into myself, into my work. She asked me yesterday what I thought of the movie and she said, “Are you pleased?” And I just said, “No, I’m honored.” I’m astonished by her work and the performances in this film. It’s so honest and it’s such a raw truth about motherhood and being a woman.
I felt a lot like how Nina feels in the movie, which is so hungry and so thirsty for something else and to be seen—to not just be the hot girl on the beach. She wants more. She wants to sink her teeth into something that satiates this hunger in her mind. I feel like that in my career a lot. I’m like, how can it be better than this? I want something deeper and darker, more real and more honest. I definitely feel like I got that with this one.
Did you talk to Maggie, going into the project, about how you wanted something like that?
Yeah. And also, you only have to ask questions in order to understand who somebody really is, and Maggie does that. I think that she saw it in me, perhaps before I saw it in myself. It was mutual—let’s go deep together.
Do you think that’s partly because she is an actor herself? You’ve worked with a wide array of directors, and it’s interesting that she would be the one to unlock a thing like that in you.
Yeah, I do. There was a level of understanding and trust that I had for her, because I knew that she knows what it feels like to not be seen. She knows what it feels like to not be handled with grace and with care…. The fact that she is an actress, of course, is a huge part of why working with her is amazing. Especially because she has a director’s mind, and also has this emotional actor’s mind of how to get inside something, inside someone’s brain.
How did you both talk about Nina? Particularly because, I think both in the book and in the film, she’s an enigmatic, tricky character for most of the story.
When Maggie and I started working on Nina stuff, I asked her if I should read the novel and she was like, “Maybe don’t read it.” [Laughs] I was on the fence about it because you’re taking an artist’s work and bringing it further. You’re helping it grow even more…. I want to make this Nina totally real, and just authentic and raw. She’s deprived—of being noticed for being a human being and being a person with a soul and a mind. And it’s devastating, but she’s also just trying, and that’s also devastating. I wanted to follow Maggie. It’s not like, Here’s the book on a screen. It’s someone receiving someone else’s work and having it touch them deeply. This is how they can share that feeling with the world.
It feels very much like its own expression; you see that in the performances, too. So you get to Greece to film, you have this really provocative screenplay. What was it like when you first started shooting it and found your rhythms?
I mean, this whole time making films during COVID is different, and it’s hard and it’s depressing. I’ve made four films in less than a year and it’s so fucking hardcore.
Wow.
I’ll get to that part. When we got to Greece, though, everyone had to quarantine for however long, two weeks or something. And then we were in such a bubble. Me, Olivia, [the cast], we were together all the time, so it didn’t feel like, oh God, first day of school. We had dinner, lunch, everything together every day and then drinks at night. And it was just like a little family. We didn’t get a positive COVID test. We didn’t shut down once. Which is so rare.
So let’s get to the hardcore part. I’m interested.
Okay. Making a movie already is so isolating, because you’re on location and you don’t always have the time to hang out, or you’re working really long hours. A lot of the time, you are just alone and with your thoughts and with the whole day of being so vulnerable. The thing that mitigates that isolation is the camaraderie that you have on set with the crew, and jokes—just silly shit. And now you don’t have that. You can’t even see anybody’s face. You can’t tell if somebody is smiling at you, or if you did a take and you see that somebody noticed and felt it. Even a director, you could only see their eyes, and sometimes people’s eyes don’t match their mouth. I’ve found that it all makes me feel extra, extra, extra, vulnerable, and extra on edge.
And you did four movies in a row, under those conditions. How did that come about?
It was wild and great. It just happens [that way] because, especially in COVID, it’s so hard to find a slot…We shot Lost Daughter, September to October of last year, about a year ago. Then I did this film that Tig Notaro and her wife, Stephanie Allen, directed called Am I Okay? Then I did [Netflix’s] Persuasion. And then my company just made a movie called Cha Cha Real Smooth.
Cooper Raiff wrote Cha Cha. We met, when I was in Greece for Lost Daughter actually, we had a zoom. I watched his film [Shithouse] and I said, what do you want to make? And he was like, well, I have this idea, the movie is called, Cha Cha Real Smooth. He started writing, we just developed the shit out of it, notes back and forth for the last year. Then we started prep in Pittsburgh and my partner was there while I was in England shooting Persuasion, and then I went pretty much directly to Pittsburgh.
Is it invigorating, maybe exhausting, to do that many things in a row? Is that a way you like to work?
If this is what’s happening right now, then this is what I’m doing, and that’s great. I’m not precious about the way I work. I’m precious about the quality. I got to Pittsburgh and I was tired and skinny and hungry, and it worked for the part. It was like, We’ll use this, and that’s fine. I don’t know. I feel like this is everything I want to do, and it’s happening right now. So I’m just going to keep doing it.
So Lost Daughter was the first thing you’d done since COVID shut everything down in March 2020, right?
I think so.
I’m asking because of what you’d said at the beginning, about the movie unlocking something in you. Did it feel like wrapping that, you were in a new place for yourself as an artist, as an actor, before getting into working for a year straight?
Yes. There was a new woman in me after that one. I came back feeling like I had let go of some things and allowed myself to become something else.
When I spoke with Maggie last month, she said that was a big part of her experience with this movie as well—she phrased it as this thing had been brewing inside of her for a long time before she made the movie. Was there a kind of a connection there in terms of that collective experience between you?
For sure. Definitely with me and Maggie—when you’re a woman and you turn 30, you have to allow something to happen—if you want. You don’t have to, but if you’re interested in going a little bit deeper, you have to say, Okay, let’s let go of the maiden or whatever it is. She kind of was my shepherd in that way. It’s almost like we both unshackled ourselves from something. I know what that is for me, and she knows what that is for her. It’s this fear of when you have the potential to do things, but you’re just like, is that going to be okay? All of the hindering thoughts that just squash your ability to be the strongest, brightest, most prolific version of yourself. I think that it’s so liberating when you work with somebody who is experiencing that and then in their hands, you can also experience that. That was special.
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