Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan recently posed for USA Today for an interview for their new film, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. Check out the interview from USA Today as well as the photoshoots!
Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson seem to go together like peanut butter and gasoline.
Put them in front of a TV camera, and they’re awkward. Uneasy. Stiff. Cautious. Guarded.
So do the two leads, who play dominant Christian Grey and submissive Anastasia Steele in the movie adaptation of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (in theaters Friday, with select Thursday screenings), detest each other? The answer, from a variety of parties, is no.
“She’s an easy person to get along with. She’s sweet,” says Dornan, who replaced Charlie Hunnam in the role just four weeks before shooting started. “We instantly had a thing. It’s so important, given what we had ahead of us. If we hadn’t liked each other, I wouldn’t have been cast. I got cast because they thought it worked. Dakota and I get on so well. We’re friends now.”
That’s a good thing, given that Dornan spanks, handcuffs and blindfolds Johnson and introduces her to the chamber of titillation (or horrors, depending on your take) known as the S&M “Red Room,” the place where Christian feels most comfortable in his own skin.
For Johnson, who played the wide-eyed college grad wooed by Christian, the scene where Ana is tied to the bed proved the hardest to shoot.
“Your senses are taken away when you’re blindfolded and tied up. It’s a really interesting brain exercise.” When the director calls “cut,” she says, “you’re still tied up and blindfolded and not in the most comfortable of positions. Having those experiences, I understand how they make sense to people in their private home. In a filming environment, it was difficult.”
Which is why, the actress says, connecting with and trusting her co-star was more important than ordinarily is the case. She had read with a slew of Hollywood’s top actors before Dornan met with her.
“It was weird because I’d gone through so many men at that point. He was very calm and funny. He was able to keep up with my joke-making and that meant a lot.”
You’ll be seeing plenty of Dakota Johnson.
At 25, the actress has disrobed to play one of the leads in the hotly anticipated romantic thriller Fifty Shades of Grey, opening Friday (with select screenings Thursday). And, yes, she says it’s unsettling to put herself out there like that.
“Sometimes I feel very nervous about it,” she says. “I don’t feel ashamed of my body. I think more women should be less ashamed of their bodies. It’s an empowering thing.
“Obviously, it’s a scary thing that a lot of people in the world will see me completely naked. But it’s not me. It’s not like they’re watching me in my room.”
Instead, they’re seeing her as Anastasia Steele, the virginal college student who gets all tied up with Christian Grey, a millionaire man-about-town with a penchant for S&M. The film has an R rating, and avoided the NC-17 kiss of death by steering clear of full-frontal nudity. Still, there are ample amounts of flesh on display. Jamie Dornan, the Christian to Johnson’s Ana, is also nearly nude.
“The thing to take from that is ‘almost,'” says Dornan, 32. “I’m not massively uncomfortable with it. There’s quite a long shot of my (butt). That’s my bum. Still my bum. Wow. You hope the end result is sexy and sensual.”
Certainly, that was the goal for director Sam Taylor-Johnson when she signed on to direct the first installment of E.L. James’ blockbuster sexual trilogy.
“This was not going to be gratuitous or salacious. It was never my intention to exploit them or their bodies,” she says. “That was the only way to garner their trust — to make things sensual, beautiful and erotic. You don’t have to be explicit.”
Taylor-Johnson isn’t worried that the mind-boggling amounts of attention lavished on the film will suddenly go to her leads’ heads and turn them into crazed egomaniacs.
“Jamie is unfazed. Fame will just wash over him. Dakota is the sweetest person — she just wants to play with the kids and hang out with the family. They’re both very grounded people,” she says.
