The 45-minute trip that launched Dakota Johnson’s career: “It was so crazy”
Having one famous parent is a massive boost to one’s career, and then there’s Dakota Johnson boasting a whole family tree.
Daughter of both Miami Vice star Don Johnson and Golden Globe winner Melanie Griffith, acting flows through her veins, and chuck in the fact that her grandmother is The Birds star Tippi Hedren and that her ex-stepfather is Antonio Banderas, she was practically guaranteed a career in show business before she was even an idea in her parents’ bedroom.
Her family connections certainly opened a lot of doors for Johnson, but she still had to put the work in during the early days. There were a number of stumbling blocks and a few TV shows on her way to her breakout role in Fifty Shades of Grey, which she only took because of Emily Blunt, weirdly enough, and among these opportunities on the small screen, one was presented to her thanks to a massive stroke of luck.
During an interview with Vanity Fair in which she reflected on her career thus far, Johnson spoke about the short-lived Fox sitcom Ben and Kate, her starring role that helped put her career on the right track, but it very nearly never happened.
“They had cast somebody else,” she revealed, “They had the entire cast, and she fell out at the last minute. My agent called me in the morning and was like, ‘Can you be at Fox in 45 minutes?’ So I went in and met with all of these people at this conference table. It was so crazy, and they told me about the show that they were basically going to start making in an hour. So I chose to go work on it, and I spent a few hours just running lines like crazy, and then I went back and I got the part.”
Ben and Kate centred on Johnson’s eponymous single mother and her brother (played by Nat Faxon) after they move in together. It’s a single-camera sitcom about the two young adults as they navigate various aspects of life. The role of Kate initially went to former Saturday Night Live cast member and future star of The Bear, Abby Elliott, but she was let go after being deemed too young to play the character, which was obviously rubbish as Johnson is two years younger than her.
While the first 16 episodes garnered strong reviews from critics, audiences simply didn’t take to it, which led to the network closing the chapter on its one-season run in 2013. Luckily, Johnson had already gotten what she wanted from the show, proving that she could helm a project and do a good job with it, and over the next few years, more and more roles would come her way until she eventually established herself as a reliable leading lady.
Acting is all about making your own luck, and Johnson flew into the right place at the right time to cinch the part in Ben and Kate, such that it was a major boon to her burgeoning career. It might not have lasted very long, but at least critics liked it, unlike certain webby future projects she would be involved in.
