Dakota Johnson’s New World

At the top of certain highly desired hills in Los Angeles, all you can see are your neighbors. Unless you’re Dakota Johnson, in which case all you can see are trees and the sky. “That’s why I love this house so much,” she tells me on a sweltering afternoon in July as we settle onto the low, soft couches in her living room. She is barefoot, in a clingy, cream-lace-trimmed top by Baserange and flowing black crepe Gala trousers from The Row, a clasped gold chain encircling each ankle, small gold hoops in her ears, hair tied up. She has a new movie, Verity, out this month. Her enormous windows frame her backyard, showing olive trees and an expanse of cloudless blue. “You can’t really see another house from it,” she says: “It feels sacred.”

Johnson and her almost-two-year-old rescue hound, Tokyo, moved here in January, after she sold her former hideaway (a dreamy oaky midcentury that had been fully pored over and lusted after thanks to an Architectural Digest feature and viral video, more on which later). She’s also pulled up stakes from Malibu, where she lived with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin during their eight-year partnership, which ended last June. This—house, life stage, moment, what have you—is not exactly where the actress thought she would be at 36. “My life has just unfolded in a surprising way,” she says, as Tokyo curls up on the couch and puffs out a sigh. They look like the Egon Schiele painting Woman with Greyhound. It is hard to imagine a better place for taking stock.

She has filled the rooms with her art and books and instruments and furnishings, including a preponderance of vintage chairs and a black-and-white photograph of a family friend, the late Hunter S. Thompson, beaming in a straw Panama hat above the hall toilet. The results are warm and comfortable and elegantly, richly feminine without seeming too professionally done, which, as it turns out, is an awful lot like what Johnson is like in person. “I’m obsessed with interior design,” she tells me. And with online auctions. “It’s a little bit of a problem…. I go into a black hole,” she says of her bidding habit. Shipments will arrive and she has no idea what’s inside. (Most recently: four different chairs.)

Film sets provide another kind of fugue state. Johnson has just emerged after having spent the spring on the Italian island of Stromboli and in Rome, producing and starring in Three Incestuous Sisters with director Alice Rohrwacher and costars Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley, and Josh O’Connor. She is still soaking in the particular bliss of the experience. Stromboli is located off the northern coast of Sicily, with an active volcano that erupts so often (“like every 15 minutes,” she says) that it’s known as the lighthouse of the Mediterranean. The cast swam in the ocean every day; Buckley and O’Connor hiked the volcano every morning. The film shoot itself “was a deeply soulful, creative experience,” Johnson says, the kind of thing she joined this industry to be part of: a safe container full of artists feeling free.

While shooting in Rome, she lived around the corner from Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele and would call him up a few times a week to tell him she was coming around for a home-cooked dinner. They have been close friends for over a decade. “She is family,” Michele tells me on a call from Rome. There is a sweetness and an elegance to her, Michele says, as well as an exuberance that’s impossible to counterfeit. “She has this gift in the way she looks at you, the way she moves, the way she approaches a thing. She’s the most natural person I have met in this business.” She’s a “really brave artist also,” he adds. “Always open, and if she believes in you, she’s really easy.”

Three Incestuous Sisters is inspired by a 2005 illustrated novel by Audrey Niffenegger that had a very limited printing (Johnson’s copy is the first I’ve actually seen). The story is a spooky spin on the Judgment of Paris; a wild-maned brunette, a blond, and a redheaded sister live happily apart from society, until a man shows up and has the gall to fall in love with only one of them. Johnson plays the redhead. Until a few days ago, her hair was down to her waist. “It was touching my belly button and getting stuck in my pants,” she tells me, wide-eyed, grabbing the ends of her newly chest-length hair. She cut it back, encouraged by Vogue’s own Tonne Goodman on the set of her cover shoot. “I was like, Alright, it’s a bit much, it’s a little bit culty.” (Michele, for his part, called this look “very LA…sort of a nice urban mermaid.”) You can tell she misses it a little.

Johnson, who started her production company, TeaTime, with one of her best friends, a former Netflix executive named Ro Donnelly, brought Niffenegger’s book to Rohrwacher. They developed it together for two and a half years (the film is due in 2027). “She is just an absolute genius,” Johnson says of the director. And that admiration is mutual: Dakota “has an aura of mystery and enchantment,” Rohrwacher writes to me in an email. “It’s impossible not to be captivated by the way she looks at the world.”

Johnson describes the classic TeaTime set as “womb-​like” and “a protective maternal space.” It should probably go without saying that this is not typical of Hollywood, where an ever-winnowing group of men bear down on their creative counterparts over budgets and timelines and tax credits and recycled IP. But Johnson and Donnelly want to reshape their corner of the film industry into a place where artists feel seen and supported. “In the beginning, ambitions were so huge, it was like, I want to be the first female-founded indie film studio,” Johnson tells me, but a slate of smaller movies (Splitsville, Daddio, Cha Cha Real Smooth) has allowed her to work the way she likes to. Donnelly will later recount to me how at one point on set in Italy, Johnson turned to her in disbelief to say, “ ‘Can you believe we get to do this?’ I’m like, I can’t, but surely you can. You grew up on set!”

That’s the point. “I’ve had experiences where people feel forgotten or lost or not taken care of or not seen on set or just undervalued, and I don’t like anyone to feel that way,” Johnson says. She has spoken out before about how, in her view, things curdled over the course of making the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy thanks to what she has described as bad oversight; how in her career she has seen a script twisted into a different film than the one she’d thought she’d signed on for. She doesn’t ever want someone on a TeaTime project to feel that way. Her belief in the power of the creative process borders on religious. “When people feel valued and safe to explore their minds, magic happens,” she says, and levels her gaze at me. “The way that it went with Three Sisters, I would be okay if that was the last movie I make.”

But first is the movie she’s already made: Verity, out this month, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s blockbuster page-turner in which she stars opposite Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. It’s a little Rebecca, a little Basic Instinct, a whole lot of jump scares meant to be consumed in a dark theater surrounded by hilarious friends. “Michael Showalter, the director, would give me direction that was so extremely camp, and that’s not really me as an artist,” Johnson says. “But it was so fun, and our references and guidelines were all these erotic thrillers that people are like, Okay, this is ridiculous, but I’m enjoying myself.”

“I was so delightfully surprised to discover that Dakota is one of the funniest people,” says Hathaway by phone from New York. “She’s really dry, but she does not miss.”

“I have this deep calling to shift my perspective a bit and maybe have a bit more of a real life”

Is it here that I should say that I did not know quite what I was walking into, that very hot July day? That I wasn’t sure if it would be target practice? Johnson, who a near decade ago was a bubbly ingenue on the brink of superstardom, has since developed a reputation for a certain cool-girl deadpan opacity, a kind of mischievous remove during press appearances. See: talk shows like Ellen (where in 2019 she flatly deflated her host’s aspersions of being left out from her 30th birthday party with: “That’s not the truth, Ellen”) and viral videos like AD’s Open Door tour, where she lied pointlessly about a styled bowl of fruit (“I love limes”; turns out she’s allergic).

She loves a bit, the TV writer Talia Bernstein tells me. Bernstein, a friend of Johnson’s, wrote and starred in the 2024 short film Loser Baby, loosely based on their friends’ lives as east side LA creatives, which Johnson directed. “She’s sillier than most people know,” says Bernstein. “I’ve been at so many small gatherings with her where she’s putting on a dance or changing into a costume…. She likes to laugh.” But according to Johnson, her posture toward the press is less a “bit” than a survival tactic. “ ‘So, Dakota, you bite the bed in this film,’ ” she intones, imagining a journalist quizzing her about Verity, “ ‘do you bite the bed during sex?’ ” She fucks around with the press and has fun doing it, she says, “because the other side is fucking with me.”

The result has made her more beloved for playing herself than just about any of her onscreen characters. “The word that comes to mind in general with Dakota is intriguing,” says Tig Notaro, who directed Johnson in 2022’s Am I OK? “That’s a huge strength.” Lena Dunham emails: “It’s hard to meet people who don’t do the Hollywood ‘I love you.’ ” (The pair first met when Johnson auditioned for Girls at 19—“It was clear she was going to be something wildly specific and massive,” Dunham writes—and they were later reconnected via a “matchmaking session” orchestrated by Taylor Swift.) “That’s a hard trick to pull off in this town. She wears her success very lightly and she doesn’t give a fuck in the right ways, yet cares deeply.”

An example. Johnson and Martin saw their breakup go public a little over a year ago, which had to be excruciating for someone as private as Johnson. (“I am obsessed with people not knowing where I am or what I’m doing,” she tells me within minutes of our meeting. “I’m far too porous and sensitive and present. I don’t—I can’t deal.”) There was a fair amount of media attention around her rumored relationship with another musician, Tucker Pillsbury, who is 28 and performs under the moniker Role Model (small world: Pillsbury is also starring in Dunham’s forthcoming Netflix rom-com Good Sex, opposite Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo). In late July, Pillsbury began performing an unreleased track, “Love I You,” featuring Johnson’s voice performing a flirtatious call-and-response. But by August rumors emerged that they were no longer dating. At one point in our time together, I ask if she wants to talk about her current romantic status. “I don’t want to say anything about that,” she says, politely. Though when she mentions an openness to directing more music videos (she directed Coldplay’s video for “Cry Cry Cry” in 2020), we have the following exchange:

“Well, you do know a lot of musicians.” (Nota bene: When she first appeared on the cover of Vogue, in 2015, she was dating Matthew Hitt, from the band Drowners.)

“They like me. I don’t know what to say.” Beat. “And I like them.”

“What’s not to like?”

“A lot! A lot.” Peal of laughter. “Tricky motherfuckers.”

Johnson’s role in Verity is Lowen Ashleigh, a down-on-her-luck writer who moves into the house of a mysteriously ailing but much more successful novelist, Verity Crawford (Hathaway), to help finish a blockbuster series of thrillers. She encounters more than she bargained for—including reciprocated attraction to Verity’s tortured husband, played by Hartnett. “I think I’d maybe thought that Lowen would initially feel a little bit more like the girl next door,” Hathaway tells me, “but—Dakota’s kind of like the panther next door. She’s actually very cozy and lovable, but she has, unmistakably, very, very powerful jungle cat energy.”

She comes by that honestly. Tippi Hedren, Johnson’s maternal grandmother, harrowed by abuse at the hands of Alfred Hitchcock on The Birds, famously turned to a life of rescuing big cats (lions; tigers; yes, panthers; and more), first at her home in Hollywood and then on her ranch, Shambala, in Acton, California. (The 96-year-old Hedren still lives at Shambala, Johnson says, though the cats are fewer in number these days: “There might be nine now; there used to be, like, 60.”) For those unversed in this branch of Hollywood history, Hedren’s daughter is Melanie Griffith, who married Don Johnson (twice), and they had Dakota. “One of the things that’s very, very cool is that [Hedren, Griffith, and Johnson] are all iconoclasts,” Hathaway says. “They’re not really similar to each other. They’re each their own thing.” Johnson, Hathaway says, handles her gilded lineage “beautifully, actually. I think she does it as well as it can be done, maybe the best of all.”

It wasn’t so easy being Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson’s kid, though Johnson doesn’t complain. Her parents divorced early and shared custody across film and TV sets in Colorado and California and beyond, with Dakota and a nanny and a tutor and her half brother running between them. She bounced around schools, too, without a stable grounding in homework or being in the classroom. Anyway—she wanted to be an actress. “Rules are really tough for me,” Johnson says, smiling. Besides, “it just became such a dangerous place, going to school.”

She’s referring to the cliquey adolescent behavior that would be familiar to any middle school girl—but also to episodes like entering a classroom to see her teacher reading a tabloid detailing her mother’s addiction struggles. To this day she loathes celebrity gossip and the paparazzi who fuel it, especially the ones who treat her like prey. Various modalities of therapy have helped—“I’m deeply interested in psychology,” she says, especially the work of Carl Jung—as has a solid network of friends and chosen family. Johnson says she met Riley Keough at age 15, who, as Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter and Elvis’s granddaughter, fully understood what she was going through. They’re still close.

Her parents wanted her to go to college; she was determined to focus on acting, and took modeling jobs to pay her rent while auditioning. And then came a small breakout role in David Fincher’s The Social Network, and not long after, Fifty Shades of Grey, which shot her into the stratosphere. Celebrated indies (A Bigger Splash, The Lost Daughter, Materialists) and big studio movies (Bad Times at the El Royale, How to Be Single, Madame Web) came calling. It’s possible that sometimes she wishes that she hadn’t answered some of those calls. But she never wishes she’d done anything else as a career.

She’s been reflecting on all of it. “I’ve worked back-to-back for so long that now I have this deep calling to shift my perspective a bit and maybe have a bit more of a real life,” she says. “I’ve been gone for, like, 20 years. The people in my life are so used to me leaving for months at a time.” She talks about doing fewer films, allowing some space to develop off-screen. She “loves” passion in her life; she says this a few times. I wonder if no-holds-barred passion goes against that image of her cool remove, and it’s the first time I see her feathers ruffle. “No. I deeply care about a lot of things. I deeply care. I wouldn’t say that I’m cool. What is that, even?” I don’t know, I answer. I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing, to be cool. “I just want to be authentic,” she says plainly. “I want to unfold and unfold and really lovingly embrace this life.” That includes a family of her own. She wants to have children. “I really do. I didn’t expect to be this age and at this place in my life, but for whatever reason, that’s the plan of the universe. So I would love that. I hope that that happens for me. I’ve always felt, especially the last few years, that there is a soul that wants to come through. And I hope that I’m lucky enough to be able to do that.”

On the Three Incestuous Sisters set, Donnelly, Buckley, and Ronan all had their babies with them. “It’s hard to be around my best friends, and even on set, and everyone has their baby, and, you know, starting families, and things turned out differently than I thought,” Johnson says quietly. “But it’s okay. I’m hopeful for that. I also just keep learning more and more and becoming a more solid woman.”

What does that look like? Her friends all bring up how much she loves to be at home, whether it’s hers or theirs. She just finished the TV room of this house, she says, and can’t wait to use the projector to watch movies; she’s considering a popcorn machine, largely for the smell. She goes to friends’ houses to cook dinner together. She takes care of herself, with herbal remedies and long baths and sleeping in when her schedule allows. She rides horses and spends time with her siblings and goes to a house she owns in Colorado to be in nature and out of the hubbub of Los Angeles. “Just low-key,” she says.

She knows that success brings unexpected personal effects: There’s this thing that happens on set, she tells me, when you have this really intense connection to the material and then you finish filming, and everyone packs up and goes home. It’s shattering, she says, it’s the very worst part. “I’ve felt that sort of heartbreak I don’t even know how many times now in my life,” she says. “It’s like leaving summer camp. It’s so devastating. And I don’t know how much more heartbreak my heart can handle.”

Tokyo, who has been moving between her bouclé dog bed and Johnson’s lap, curls up against her waist like an asterisk. Johnson kisses her snout. “Maybe spending a little bit more time just existing as a human is what I’ll be doing.”

In this story: hair, Mark Townsend; makeup, Georgie Eisdell. manicurist, Emi Kudo; tailor, Susie Kourinian.

Produced by GS World Media. Set Design: Kelly Infield. Visuals Editor: Paige Viti

Via: Vogue