BORN INTO THESPIAN NOBILITY (HER PARENTS, DON JOHNSON AND MELANIE GRIFFITH, ARE BONA-FIDE A-LISTERS, BUT JOHNSON’S TINSELTOWN LINEAGE DOESN’T END THERE), THE EMERALD-EYED ACTRESS MADE HER SILVER SCREEN DEBUT IN 1999’S CRAZY IN ALABAMA, BUT IT WOULD BE ANOTHER 16 YEARS BEFORE SHE CLINCHED INTERNATIONAL STARDOM WITH THE CRITICALLY PANNED BUT STILL WILDLY SUCCESSFUL FIFTY SHADES OF GREY TRILOGY. SINCE, SHE’S ENJOYED A GENRE-SPANNING DECADE OF FILMOGRAPHY, STARRING IN BOTH BIGTICKET BLOCKBUSTERS AND INDIE BREAKOUTS (EVEN LAUNCHING A PRODUCTION COMPANY, TEATIME PICTURES), INCLUDING HER LATEST: BACK-TO-BACK SUMMER ROM-COMS: MATERIALISTS AND SPLITSVILLE

BY WILL HARRIS • PORTRAITS BY JUSTIN BETTMAN/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

The term “nepo baby” is thrown around a lot these days, particularly in conjunction with Hollywood, but sometimes one simply can’t fight genetics, and when your parents are both venerable actors and your grandmother was directed by Alfred Hitchcock… Well, suffice it to say that even if Dakota Johnson’s family did give her a leg up in terms of starting her career, she’s proven that she’s got more than enough acting talent in her DNA to maintain that career on her own merits.

Born in Austin, Texas, in 1989 while her father was filming The Hot Spot, Dakota Mayi Johnson is as most of the world knows by now the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and her grandmother (Melanie’s mom) is Tippi Hedren. Given that both of her parents were working actors throughout her childhood, Johnson spent a good chunk of her upbringing being indoctrinated into the Hollywood lifestyle, visiting them on sets, attending their movie premieres, and so on.

Unsurprisingly, this led her to develop an interest in pursuing an acting career, although it’s an interest that her parents made no effort to encourage. In fact, they actively did the opposite. “My parents were always working with amazing artists, and I just loved it,” Johnson recalled to W Magazine in 2022. “I wanted to be a part of it so badly. They discovered [me]. See how well that turned out? But I understood. They wanted me to have as much of a childhood as I could.”

With that said, Griffith was apparently at least slightly less committed to that scenario than Johnson’s dad, as the young actress made her film debut in 1999’s Crazy in Alabama, starring Griffith and directed by Griffith’s then-husband, Antonio Banderas. Mind you, it wasn’t exactly the biggest stretch for Johnson as an actress: she and her stepsister, Stella Banderas, played Griffith’s daughters in the film. But hey, everybody’s got to start somewhere, right?

Although she signed to a modeling agency for a time, Johnson always had her eye on acting as a career, and just after entering her twenties, she scored her first big gig on her own: playing Amy Ritter in David Fincher’s 2010 Facebook film, The Social Network. No, it wasn’t a huge role, but it did involve working rather closely with Justin Timberlake not a bad gig for the teenage Johnson

“Are you kidding? I was just like 19 and straddling Justin Timberlake and whipping him in the face with my hair,”

Johnson told Vanity Fair in 2024. “[I] 100% had preconceived notions [about him], but he was lovely and kind and really welcoming for a person that was just a stranger.”

From there, Johnson picked up roles in films ranging from the Beauty and the Beast adaptation Beastly to the cinematic adaptation of 21 Jump Street to the movie version of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, not to mention starring in the short-lived Fox TV series Ben and Kate (she played Kate), but the project that really turned the tide for her career was being cast as Ana Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels.

In that same Vanity Fair interview, Johnson discussed how the Fifty Shades films while invaluable in terms of raising her profile as an actress were a struggle to make.

“I signed up to do a very different version of the film we ended up making,” said Johnson, citing author E.L. James as being part of the problem. “She had a lot of creative control, all day, every day, and she just demanded that certain things happen. There were parts of the books that just wouldn’t work in a movie, like the inner monologue, which was at times incredibly cheesy. It wouldn’t work to say out loud. It was always a battle. Always. When I auditioned for that movie, I read a monologue from Persona the Ingmar Bergman classic from 1966 and I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be really special.’”

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t…or certainly not as special as a Bergman film, anyway. But it did make Johnson a bankable movie star, so there’s that, at least.

In the midst of the Fifty Shades films making their way to theaters, Johnson turned up in films like Black Mass, the mob drama starring Johnny Depp, and How to Be Single, an ensemble comedy in which she co-starred alongside Rebel Wilson, Alison Brie, and Leslie Mann. After being freed from the Fifty Shades films after Fifty Shades Freed, appropriately enough she headlined the remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, co-starred in Drew Goddard’s Bad Times at the El Royale, and turned up in critically acclaimed films like The Peanut Butter Falcon, Our Friend, and The Lost Daughter. Additionally, she both produced and starred in the films Am I Okay?, Cha Cha Real Smooth, and Daddio.

Oh, and let’s not forget her Razzie-winning turn in 2024’s Madame Web, a film which Johnson later admitted that she knew would be received poorly.

“Sandra Bullock sent me a voice note being like, ‘I heard you are in the Razzie club, and we should have brunch. We should have, like, a monthly brunch,’” Johnson told Amy Poehler on the latter’s Good Hang podcast. “Because I guess she won that the year that she won the Oscar as well. I freaked out getting this message from her because she’s so iconic to me…as, like, a movie star. It was just crazy.”

Thankfully, things have turned around for Johnson since then: Materialists, which came out in June, was critically acclaimed, and Splitsville, which made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May, will begin its rollout into American theaters on August 22.

“Truly, I honestly thought I would never go to Cannes,” Johnson told Deadline. “I was like, ‘There must be some weird curse on me where I’ll just never get to do it. I just think there’s something ineffable in the air around film festivals where it’s the artistry and the excitement about what the movies have made people feel, and you can really feel that there. And then, of course, the glamour. It’s so beautiful and opulent. But for me, it’s really being around all of those other artists and being around people who are like, ‘Oh, I’ve just seen this.’ That to me is so fun. It’s so exciting.”