Well, Dakota Johnson is certainly making her voice heard on her “Madame Web” press tour. The latest from the actress? Variety reports that Johnson sounded off about the current Hollywood climate in a new interview with L’Officiel, diagnosing the industry as “really f*cking bleak” and rife with streaming platforms run by people “afraid” to take creative risks. I mean, she’s not wrong, but let’s hear her comments in entirety first.
Johnson’s remarks began with talking about how difficult it was for her new film “Daddio,” co-starring Sean Penn, to get made. “We made a movie called “Daddio” that was sold at Telluride to Sony Classics, which was amazing, but it took a lot of fighting to get that made,” Johnson recalled. “People are just so afraid, and I’m like, ‘Why? What’s going to happen if you do something brave?’ It just feels like nobody knows what to do and everyone’s afraid. That’s what it feels like. Everyone who makes decisions is afraid. They want to do the safe thing and the safe thing is really boring.”
The difficulty with “Daddio” was a cataylst in Johnson “discovering that it’s really f*cking bleak in this industry. It is majorly disheartening.” The actress thinks the advent of streaming platforms and how often their heads want to play it safe creatively. “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,” Johnson went on. “It’s really heartbreaking. It’s just f*cking 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.”
Johnson hasn’t held back about how she feels about Hollywood’s contemporary creative culture as she promotes “Madame Web.” Earlier this month, she told EW that she found filming in so many CGI-saturated scenes as “psychotic.” “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,” Johnson said. “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 okay job!’” Along with her recent comments to L’Officiel, it sounds like Johnson isn’t happy with how her foray into superhero movies ended up. In fact, one could read between the lines and siphon her stance down to “”Madame Web” is terrible and indicative of the catastrophic state of the film industry.” But let’s wait and see if the film really is the next “Morbius” after it hits theaters on February 14.
But let’s not assume that Johnson hated “Madame Web” from the get-go. She told L’Officiel that she really liked the film’s premise. “When the script came along, I loved the idea of a superhero being a young woman whose mind was extremely powerful,” explained the actress. “I liked the dynamic between her and these three young women; how they genuinely protect and support and care for each other. And so, it just seemed different to me and it was way more grounded and real and gritty. I just thought it was an interesting way to experience that world.”
But Johnson hasn’t been following the various memes that arose after the first trailer for “Madame Web” dropped last November. When The Huffington Post brought up a line of hers from the trailer that went viral, the actress wasn’t having it. “Somebody brought this up and I have no idea what it’s about,” she responded. “Isn’t any sentence out of context out of context? What a silly thing. That seems like a very basic storyline to me, but maybe I’m just underneath it.”
Johnson sounds exhausted with the media industry at large. The actress also isn’t a big fan of the nepo baby discourse that’s swept through entertainment journalism over the past couple of years. “When that first started I found it to be incredibly annoying and boring,” Johnson told NBC’s “Today” this week. “If you’re a journalist, then write about something else. That’s just lame. The opportunity to make fun of it I jumped at.” The daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, Johnson qualifies as a nepo baby, but she’s not fazed by the assertion, even mocking it on the episode of “Saturday Night Live” she hosted two weekends ago.
Maybe Johnson’s next acting gig will be less meme-able than “Madame Web.” She stars next in the A24 romantic comedy “The Materialists” with Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal. The film is Celine Song‘s follow-up to last year’s smash hit “Past Lives,” which made several publications annual top 10 lists, even topping some of them. That could be a more prestigious, critically successful film than “Madame Web,” but is it any riskier creatively? Time will tell with that.
As for “Madame Web,” as noted earlier, it hits theaters on Valentine’s Day. Stay tuned if it’s a total bust and Johnson’s press tour comment indeed indicated as such.