After fronting the blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, Dakota Johnson is used to showing some skin onscreen. Talking about that fact with president of the United States? Not so much. While revisiting roles from her career for Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection video series, Johnson recalled the time her mother, Oscar-nominated actor Melanie Griffith, embarrassingly referenced her revealing scene opposite Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s The Social Network.
“One time I was with my mom and we were meeting Barack Obama, and it was a huge deal,” Johnson tells VF. “He was talking to her and she goes, ‘Oh, Mr. President, this is my daughter. She just did a movie. She’s an actress too. She was in The Social Network. She’s in her underwear.’ And I died. I died inside.”
While Johnson’s work often makes headlines—and potentially frazzles world leaders—“I’ve found sometimes when I’m resistant to doing something is when I should probably do it,” she says, “especially when it comes to a job.”
That was true of her 2019 indie film The Peanut Butter Falcon, in which Johnson “fell madly in love” with the creative team, including her costar Zack Gottsagen, for whom she says she’s developing a project. Johnson was offered the opportunity to play a social worker who cares for Gottsagen’s character at a “weird” time for her personally. “I was in a place in my life where I was resistant to working at all at that time,” she recalls, “and it kind of saved me.”
Now, Johnson is taking another career leap with her directorial debut—a short film called Loser Baby written by and starring Ghosts’ Talia Bernstein, which recently debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. She’s learned something from all her previous filmmakers, but Johnson says it was Maggie Gyllenhaal—an actor turned director herself who cast Johnson in The Lost Daughter—who offered particular inspiration. “Maggie made me feel, in terms of directing my own stuff, like it’s okay to want to do that,” she says. “Maybe there’s a part of me that’s like, ‘I can’t do that cause I’m an actress, but I can and I would love to.’ Her bravery and fuck it, I’m gonna make this exactly what is in my mind [attitude], and the confidence in that is so inspiring.”
