What is it about “Platinum-Grade nepo baby” Dakota Johnson that makes her such a viral clip and quote machine? Best known for the Fifty Shades franchise, 2018’s Suspiria remake, and foreshadowing the downfall of Ellen DeGeneres’ public image, she seems to occupy a specific, incomprehensible place in the public imagination. Case in point? The Madame Web press tour, which has forced her to weather questions both predictable and inane (and even a literal earthquake) while breathless headlines try in vain to piece together where, exactly, she’s coming from. Does she hate the movie, or are we just not used to unfiltered celebrity press tours anymore?
These days, it’s rare for a celebrity to actually call out the funhouse discourse that often surrounds them. In the age of endless media training, stars like Johnson and Cillian Murphy (who is famously allergic to both memes and press tours) are a vanishing breed. A messy celebrity press tour is a beautiful thing, but to my eye, Johnson’s has been subject to a lot of decontextualization and misinterpretation. I don’t think she hates Madame Web so much as the brainless machine that made it. The entire ordeal calls to mind a line from Johnson’s recent Saturday Night Live monologue: “I’m just not good at talking to journalists,” she said. “I think the big problem is that I say stuff and then they write it down. And that’s not fair because most of the time, I’m joking.”
As seen during her anxiety-inducing moment with Ellen, Johnson seems allergic to bullshit. When asked last month about a widely memed Madame Web line—“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”—she asked the HuffPost UK reporter why the line had gone viral in the first place. He cheerfully explained that it might’ve been the lack of context, but she pressed further: “Isn’t any sentence out of context, out of context?”
Speaking of words being taken out of context, let’s discuss a quote from Johnson that went viral this week. Pop Crave tweeted out a quote from Johnson with the description “Dakota Johnson on her relationship with her Madam Web [sic] co-stars.” The statement in question: “It was so fun having them around. The three of them really bonded and then there was me.” Readers took that to mean that Johnson had perhaps avoided her co-stars, but in reality, she was humorously responding to a question about the generational gap between herself and her younger colleagues.
As seen in the full clip, which Pop Crave included as a reply under its original tweet, Entertainment Tonight reporter Ash Crossan had originally asked Johnson the question after rolling a clip of her character, Cassie, getting trolled by her three younger co-stars. “There’s a mentor slash generational gap between these girls and Cassie,” Crossan said. “What was your relationship with the three girls on set as actresses?” Her full response: “It was very similar. I adore them, and I think they’re so talented, and it was so fun to have them around, and the three of them really bonded. And then there was me.” Johnson might not have become best friends with her co-stars, but it also doesn’t seem like she gave them the cold shoulder.
Next, we should examine the viral quotes about Johnson not having seen Madame Web. Yes, she’s confirmed multiple times that she has not seen Madame Web and doesn’t plan to any time soon. “I don’t know when I’ll see it,” she told Magic Radio last month. “Someday.” At the same time, Johson seemed to confirm during the same interview that she doesn’t watch most of her movies. When asked if she tends to stick around for her film premieres or go to dinner, she answered the latter. “For me,” she said, “not watching my movies is like self-care.”
Johnson repeated her confirmation that she’s never seen Madame Web during her MTV interview this week, where she also discussed what appealed to her about the project. “I wasn’t ever planning on being in a superhero movie,” she said, “but I read the script and I loved the idea of a young woman having her superpower be her mind and using that to alter the future so that it’s a better outcome for other people.”
Whatever you might think about Johnson’s avoidance toward her own filmography, it does not appear to be specific to Madame Web—even if she has only seen, as she put it to MTV, 4 percent of all Marvel movies, meaning “15 minutes of one.”
Some publications have also cited Johnson’s comments about the “absolutely psychotic” experience of filming in front of a bluescreen as proof that she did not enjoy her time on Madame Web, but in the original Entertainment Weekly interview in which she shared it, she actually made the statement to underscore her trust in her director, SJ Clarkson.
“I trusted her so much,” Johnson told EW. “I’ve never really done a movie where you are on a blue screen, and there’s fake explosions going off, and someone’s going, ‘Explosion!’ and you act like there’s an explosion. That to me was absolutely psychotic. I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be good at all! I hope that I did an OK job!’ But I trusted her. She works so hard, and she has not taken her eyes off this movie since we started.”
It’s not like Johnson has avoided the usual promo quotes, either. During her Entertainment Tonight interview, she gamely discussed her character’s lore and what makes her relatable—all the usual, boring stuff that of course did not get much pick-up. Speaking with the Inside Total Film podcast, Johnson even confirmed she would return to future Madame Web films if asked. “If they want me to come back then I definitely will," she said. "I have no idea what's in store."
Given both Johnson’s reputation as an agent of chaos and the negative reviews Madame Web has generated, it’s not surprising that people are assuming the worst when they read snippets of what she’s said. At the same time, the way various articles and social media accounts have framed her quotes feels like a great demonstration of how chasing virality inevitably obscures meaning. It’s far more exciting to think that Johnson is bashing Madame Web specifically than it is to confront her qualms about Hollywood’s broader decay.
Some of Johnson’s best Madame Web quotes have had nothing to do with the film itself. She’s confessed her hatred for her time on The Office, dished to MTV about the time a casting team called her “pretentious” for daring to shake their hands, and, most notably, decried how “fucking bleak” the entertainment industry has become. As she put it to L’Officiel, “The people who run streaming platforms don’t trust creative people or artists to know what’s going to work, and that is just going to make us implode. It’s really heartbreaking. It’s just fucking so hard. It’s so hard to get anything made. All of the stuff I’m interested in making is really different, and it’s unique and it’s very forward in whatever it is.”
One could take that as a direct comment about the movie she is promoting, but it feels more likely that she’s speaking a wider truth—one that can be perilous for her less connected peers to point out. She might find the entire nepo baby discourse “incredibly annoying and boring,” but hey! At least when it comes to the brokenness of Hollywood, this particular nepo baby is using her platform for good.
Check out our past Nepo Babies of the Week.
