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Dakota Johnson is the most unfairly maligned actress in Hollywood

Dakota Johnson is the most unfairly maligned actress in Hollywood

We should ignore the mournful eulogies for the 'movie star.' As the cinematic titans of the '90s and 2000s shuffle off towards the Sunset Boulevard Retirement Village, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh and Austin Butler have cemented their status as household names, box office drawcards and awards-show darlings.
But every generation of actors has a black sheep – the one whose talent is routinely debated, whose success baffles the masses, and whose occasional missteps obscure their accomplishments, their genius only recognised in hindsight. Gene Kelly, Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Colin Farrell all weathered excessive criticism before finding their rightful place in the pantheon. Dakota Johnson is this era's black sheep. While her contemporaries have been showered in praise, Johnson is misunderstood and maligned, the subject of mockery and meme fodder.
Her acting has been described as wooden, one-dimensional, and bland. Audiences have lambasted her for awkward line readings and detached onscreen appearances, lacking warmth and personality. She's 'won' two Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Actress for Fifty Shades of Grey and Madame Web. Most notoriously, she became the poster child for online 'nepo baby' backlash (daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith). Her career is perceived as all family, no talent.
Dakota Johnson isn't a bad actor – she's great. But goodness, she needed a new agent yesterday. She is abysmal at choosing projects. Her acting reputation's become inseparable from her awful films.
Most people's introduction to Johnson was as the lead in the critically derided Fifty Shades of Grey. She was predictably swept up in the tsunami of bad reviews, although her performance was the only watchable part. In a movie that, despite its scandalous subject, manages to be both boring and bizarrely straitlaced, Johnston almost convinces you there's chemistry between her and the wooden plank that is Jamie Dornan. Just as it took Kristen Stewart a full decade to even begin washing away the cinematic stench of the Twilight films, the reputational damage from the Fifty Shades series still stubbornly lingers.
Johnson's been in some other stinkers (Wounds, Black Mass, How to Be Single). Yet even when saddled with cringey dialogue and a plot that openly defies logic, she consistently shows herself capable of single-handedly lifting the material with sheer charm, undeniable charisma, and an admirable commitment to the bit. Frankly, could anyone have saved the rampant garbage fire that was Madame Web?
Yet when Johnson does land a good script, competent co-stars, and a proper director, it is something to behold. Primarily because that allows Johnson to showcase her greatest strength as an actor: the delicate art of subtlety. Not one to chew scenery, the cocked eyebrow, the minuscule, knowing smile, or the perfectly timed pause of repressed emotion. Genuine responses, shielded vulnerability, perfect timing. In a good movie, it looks effortless. In a bad movie, it looks like no effort.
In Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake of horror classic Suspiria, Johnson is perfect as our gateway to the desperate, claustrophobic world of balletic revulsion. She goes toe-to-toe with the great Tilda Swinton in arguably the best horror ensemble of the century. Johnson further held her own against Oscar-winning powerhouse Olivia Colman in the psychological drama The Lost Daughter, portraying a troubled mother teetering on the brink of mental collapse.
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Kristen Stewart was warned not to make this film. She almost blew it
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Sydney Morning Herald

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  • Sydney Morning Herald

Kristen Stewart was warned not to make this film. She almost blew it

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Kristen Stewart was warned not to make this film. She almost blew it
Kristen Stewart was warned not to make this film. She almost blew it

The Age

time11 hours ago

  • The Age

Kristen Stewart was warned not to make this film. She almost blew it

When Kristen Stewart read Lidia Yuknavitch's cult memoir The Chronology of Water, she immediately felt herself to be part of the writer's tribe. 'There are certain pieces that unlock you, whether it's a book or a movie or a relationship you have or just a conversation you have with someone, that can lead you to understand you aren't listening to yourself the way you should be,' she says. Yuknavitch's book surges forward from her childhood with an abusive father and permanently sedated mother, through youthful addiction and tortured relationships, to her realisation – guided by her mentor, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey – that she is a writer. Stewart was only halfway through reading it when she contacted Yuknavitch to ask if she could make it into a film. Speaking in Cannes, where her adaptation was screening at the annual film festival, she calls the book 'a lifesaving piece of material'. 'This book is like the keys to your own castle. And I thought when I read it that if I had this relationship to it, I couldn't be alone. It's such a personal interaction you have with reading a book, but I wanted to do it out loud and with other people.' Stewart, 35, has been famous – and famously uncomfortable with it – since playing a young woman in love with a vampire in the $US3.3 billion Twilight saga. Being Bella Swan made her reportedly the highest-paid actress in the world. Since that franchise wrapped in 2012, however, she has worked largely outside the mainstream, with independent directors including Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria in 2014, for which she won a French Cesar), Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women in 2016) and Pablo Larrain (the 2021 film Spencer, an extraordinary performance that earned her Golden Globe and Oscar nominations). For a good chunk of that time she was also working on The Chronology of Water. Loading It was a formidable challenge, but nothing could dissuade her. 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Loading People told her that first films always felt like that. No, she says. This was worse. 'It was a precarious situation.' She and the cinematographer, Corey Waters, 'free-jazzed' the movie she had in her mind's eye. In Waters, she says, she discovered a brother. Other department heads were sacked and replaced during production. That was risky, obviously, but 'essential to protect the movie and create the life that it has'. 'And it's such a lucky thing the movie was getting f---ed. When I got back from the shoot, I realised I was opening all these gifts. The movie had a life of its own, so it had a memory. And once we had created all of the pictures, they had an emotional connectivity and sense memory that you could see.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson to star in Werwulf and Lily Rose-Depp 'in talks'
Aaron Taylor-Johnson to star in Werwulf and Lily Rose-Depp 'in talks'

Perth Now

time16-07-2025

  • Perth Now

Aaron Taylor-Johnson to star in Werwulf and Lily Rose-Depp 'in talks'

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is set to star in Werwulf. The 35-year-old actor will reunite with director Robert Eggers on the motion picture, after sources confirmed to Deadline that Taylor-Johnson has signed up for the movie. And the insider also revealed Lily Rose-Depp is in talks to appear alongside him. Both Taylor-Johnson and Rose-Depp previously teamed up with Eggers for 2024 gothic horror film Nosferatu. Eggers will helm Werwulf, which is slated to be released on Christmas Day 2026 in the US. While plot details are yet to be revealed, the motion picture is expected to be a 13th century werewolf horror movie. But it is known that Eggers has reunited with his The Northman collaborator Sjón for the script. In January, insiders told the Hollywood Reporter that the story will be set in 13th century England, with dialogue "true to the time period". Translations and annotations will be provided for those who don't understand Old English, but Eggers has now decided against shooting the film in black and white. Nosferatu - which also stars Bill Skarsgard, Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Hoult and Emma Corrin - tells the terrifying tale of a young woman who finds herself the target of the ancient Transylvanian vampire Count Orlok after the creature becomes infatuated by her. The 41-year-old director recently revealed the inspirations behind his remake of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent German Expressionist vampire film. It was influenced by Jack Clayton's 1961 picture The Innocents, which is based on 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw by the American novelist Henry James. The novella focuses on a governess who watches over two children and comes to fear that their large estate is haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed. During an appearance on Alamo Drafthouse's YouTube series Guest Selects, the filmmaker said: 'I think it is one of the best - perhaps the best - gothic ghost movie ever made. 'I watch it a couple times a year probably for inspiration. Freddy Francis was the cinematographer, who directed many Hammer horror films, but his finest collaborations are with Jack Clayton. "And what he does with the camera was very inspiring to what my cinematographer and I were up to with Nosferatu."

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