When Dakota Johnson’s “really special” audition ended in a “psychotic” 2015 movie
In terms of Hollywood nepo babies, they don’t come more nepotistic than Dakota Johnson. Not only are her parents Miami Vice’s Don Johnson and the Oscar-nominated Melanie Griffith, but her grandmother is the great Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and she also grew up with Antonio Banderas as her stepfather.
Coming of age in this environment has afforded Johnson a number of opportunities, which she has capitalised upon to great effect. Her filmography is utterly bizarre, as nestled among indie standouts like Am I OK? and The Lost Daughter are some of the worst big-budget movies of recent times. Madame Web would have been a career killer for just about anyone else, and then there is one of the biggest crimes ever committed towards cinema: the Fifty Shades trilogy.
Based on EL James’ monster hit series of Twilight fanfiction turned erotic novels, the first Fifty Shades of Grey film came out in 2015 and starred Johnson as Anastasia Steele, a timid student, who enters a twisted relationship with rich businessman Christian Grey, played by Jamie Dornan, which tests the boundaries of both participants. Reviewers absolutely ripped it to shreds (and with good reason), with everything from the performances to the dialogue to the gratuitous sex scenes drawing criticism, winning it five Golden Raspberry Awards, including the ‘Worst Actress’ prize for Johnson.
While her co-star knew from the very start that people would hate Fifty Shades of Grey, Johnson was more optimistic. As she explained to Vanity Fair, she went into the project with higher hopes than she probably should have.
“When I auditioned for that movie, I read a monologue from Persona,” she recalled, referring to the Ingmar Bergman movie from 1966, “I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be really special’”.
Despite having the very capable Sam Taylor-Johnson on board as director, Johnson explained that James was heavily involved in adapting her work. She wanted to keep a lot of things from the book that just wouldn’t have worked on the screen, which caused chaos behind the scenes.
“She had a lot of creative control, all day, every day, and she just demanded that certain things happen,” Johnson continued, “If I had known at the time that’s what it was going to be like, I don’t think anyone would’ve done it. It would’ve been like, ‘Oh, this is psychotic’. But no, I don’t regret it.”
Unfortunately for everyone’s eyes, ears, and stomachs, the first Fifty Shades movie earned more than the GDP of a small European nation at the box office. Taylor-Johnson was replaced by the late James Foley for the next two films, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, and each subsequent release made less money and somehow got even worse.
The Fifty Shades movies didn’t stand a chance anyway, but the disjointed backstage environment certainly did it no favours. Johnson should have absolutely tempered her expectations from the start. If she thought that a film based on a book that began life as a piece of Twilight fan fiction was going to be good, then that’s on her.
