Skip to main content

Dakota Johnson’s impressive talent isn’t a secret anymore

Few movie careers have been more bizarre than Dakota Johnson’s. Johnson, a child of Hollywood royalty, has created a defined public persona around being odd in public. She damaged Ellen DeGeneres’ already tarnished reputation when she called out the talk show host for not coming to her birthday party and then lying about it on air. She claimed to love limes during a tour of her home for Architectural Digest, only to reveal that those limes were a piece of set decoration that she couldn’t resist commenting on. What’s more, she may have trapped some coffee shop employees inside their store. It’s pure chaos, and that raw possibility has often extended to the roles she takes on.

Outside of her almost impossible-to-pin down online persona, Johnson has shown enough promise to become one of the great actresses of her generation, and it’s that same energy that has made her so compelling onscreen. Johnson’s big break came with the Fifty Shades series, but it speaks to her talent that she pretty quickly moved past that franchise once it was over. Since then, she has taken the chaos and mystery that defines her public persona and wielded it to create fascinating characters on the big screen.

Making a big splash with A Bigger Splash

Dakota Johnson in A Bigger Splash.

Johnson has harnessed her innately chaotic energy to bring depth to a wide variety of roles in this vein. Luca Guadagnino was among the first to discover exactly what she was capable of, and he used to it full effect in 2015’s A Bigger Splash. Johnson only has a supporting role in the film, but she shares the screen with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes, and more than holds her own. This first collaboration with Guadagnino casts Johnson as Pen, a young girl who is almost impossible to resist, but hides herself behind that obvious appeal.

Johnson’s performance in A Bigger Splash is, in some ways, the template upon which the best performances of her career will be based. Pen is the kind of character that Johnson excels at playing — someone who is magnetic but uses that magnetism as a weapon and a shield. She knows that she can hide herself, and she keeps that façade up until she is totally alone, and we see it break down almost immediately. What Johnson is great at, though, is allowing audiences to sense that there is something her characters are choosing to bury below the surface, so that when we finally see it come to the fore it feels like an inevitability instead of a surprise.

A Bigger Splash was, more than any other single project, a pivot point for Johnson, who starred in Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake just a few years later. Without getting into spoilers for that film, Guadagnino is once again playing off of Johnson’s ability to play characters carrying great secrets. In this case, Suspiria seems to cast her as an almost powerless ingenue, only to reveal that she has much more power than any of the people around her may have suspected.

A prestige darling

Dakota Johnson in Suspiria.

Thanks in part to her collaborations with Guadagnino, more and more directors began to understand just how gifted Johnson was. The Lost Daughter sees Johnson in another supporting role, but one in which all of her strengths are on display. Playing Nina, a young mother who finds herself overwhelmed by the responsibility, Johnson is utterly sympathetic. Olivia Colman’s Leda finds herself invariably drawn to Nina, watching her on the beach before the two have ever really met. The Lost Daughter is Colman’s movie, but none of it would work without Johnson creating a plausible human out of Nina, who could so easily become nothing more than an object of fascination for both Leda and the audience.

More recently, she’s starred in Cha Cha Real Smooth and Persuasion, a pair of projects that are designed in large part around her magnetism as a performer. Cha Cha Real Smooth, in particular, gives Johnson an almost impossible task. She has to play a sexy, mysterious young mom who finds herself won over by the charms of a recent college grad. A plotline like this could read as hacky and riddled with cliché, but thanks to Johnson’s performance, her character feels like a real version of the trope-laden character we so often see. Johnson’s Domino is not a mysterious single mom, she’s just someone who’s trying her best to keep her feet planted on the ground, even as her impulses try to carry her off in other directions.

Unwrapping a mystery

Dakota Johnson stickes her tongue out in Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Johnson’s larger project, then, has been about busting the myth of the mysterious woman. Her characters are almost always undeniably alluring, but what makes them so wonderful is that getting to know them transforms them into so much more than that. Each and every one of her characters starts with what seems like a similar shell. But, for one reason or another, each of those shells eventually gets cracked, only to reveal someone much more compelling underneath.

What makes Johnson a great performer, though, is that while the shell may always be similar, what’s underneath can vary wildly. She can play a malevolent villain, a totally normal mom longing for stability, or a young woman just barely managing to hide how freaked out she is about what’s going on around her.

Each of these roles proves what a talented actress Johnson is, but it also extends to how we see her even when she’s not playing a character. Dakota Johnson has found a way to be a public person while telling us almost nothing about who she actually is. It’s a wise and deeply sane choice, and one that has hopefully allowed her to maintain some real privacy in her life.

So, yes, her limes and interviews with Ellen are utter chaos, but that doesn’t mean that disorder describes who Johnson really is. Like all of her best roles, it’s possible that the chaos is just a veneer, an expert way to hide her deeper humanity from public view. Whether she’s playing someone else or some version of herself, Johnson has proved herself to be a generational talent already.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Joe Allen
Joe Allen is a freelance writer based in upstate New York focused on movies and TV.
Denver Nuggets vs Miami Heat: How to watch the NBA Finals for free
The Verizon Center, empty but ready for a basketball game.

It's time to decide who the best NBA team of 2023 is. The Denver Nuggets had a fairly easy trip through the Western Conference Finals, running over the LA Lakers in four games straight. The Miami Heat had a closer call. After beating the Boston Celtics in the first three games, they lost the next three, which forced a final seventh game. The Celtics hoped to be the first team in NBA history to come back from three straight losses to win the conference finals. Ultimately, the Heat dominated in Game 7.

Did the Heat's near-loss shake them up or make them stronger? Did the Nuggets' easy wins hype them up or give them too much time off? We'll find out tonight. Game 1 of the NBA Finals is tonight, June 1, at 8:30 p.m. ET. It will be broadcast on ESPN+ and ABC. The rest of the series will be ABC exclusive. Several of the best live TV streaming services have ABC. If you time your subscription right, you can even get the first few games for free by way of a free trial. These are your best options.
Watch the NBA Finals live stream on FuboTV

Read more
What’s new on Paramount+ in June 2023
Ethan Peck as Spock in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

June may be unofficially the month of Star Trek on Paramount+. Starting on June 1, the first 10 Star Trek movies are officially coming home to Paramount's streaming service. And on June 15, the long-awaited second season premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will take viewers back to the prequel era a decade before the events of the original season. Fittingly, a young James T. Kirk will have a much bigger role this season than he did in the first season.

Fortunately for non-Star Trek fans, Paramount+ also has a wide selection of movies that are joining its lineup this month, including Arrival, The Social Network, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Say Anything, and more. This month also marks the third season premiere of the iCarly revival, which has some pretty devoted fans of its own. To keep you up to speed on the new arrivals, we've assembled this full list of everything coming to Paramount+ in June 2023, while also sharing our recommendations in bold.

Read more
Everything leaving Hulu in June 2023
A scene from Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk.

Summer is here, and you can expect the heat to be close behind. But before the June swoon sets in, there are plenty of movies and TV shows to keep you occupied at home. Disney and 20th Century Studios may have poached the Hulu original film The Boogeyman for a theatrical release this month, but it's bound to arrive on Hulu in the near future. In the meantime, there's always something new on Hulu that you can enjoy.

But as the new shows and movies come in, some of the older titles in the library are going away. Even some of the 20th Century Studios films like Rise of the Planet of the Apes aren't immune to this trend. And while these TV series and movies will likely show up on another streaming service soon, don't you think you should get your money's worth as a Hulu subscriber? We do, and that's why we’ve put together this list of everything leaving Hulu in June 2023. Our picks are in bold, and all you have to do is find the opportunity to watch them.

Read more