“America is still so sexually oppressed.
Isn’t God’s gift to humans the orgasm?” said a co-creative director of the sexual
wellness brand Maude and actor Dakota Johnson.
If you were looking at her Instagram Stories over the past few months, you might have noticed
that she promoted a vibrator to her fans.
However, the road to becoming the open, straightforward and self-aware person she is today wasn’t
all sunshine and roses.
Her parents are wild-living stars Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson , whose addictions
and marital strife couldn’t help but scar her childhood.
In today’s video, we guarantee you a rollercoaster of emotions.
Beware!
Dakota Johnson, born in Texas and raised NOWHERE in particular, was destined for an unconventional
life.
Her parents were on filming locations for long stretches of her childhood, and Dakota
tagged along.
But she didn’t just grow up on the sets of famous movies and TV shows, she also had
to somehow study there.
Young Johnson can’t count the number of schools she attended, a few months here or
there, or the number of childhood friendships that, sadly, slipped away.
Add her parents’ addictions to pills and booze, her dad’s notorious womanizing side-gig,
and mix it all with growing up in the public’s eyes.
You’ll get a cocktail that resulted in her attending therapy at the very young age of
THREE.
Young Dakota had to deal with her parents’ separation and their well-publicized struggles.
“I was so consistently adrift and perplexed.
I didn’t have an anchor anywhere.”
She played a constant game of back and forth, living between her mother and father’s homes,
but school proved to be the biggest challenge for the future actor.
If she didn’t have a stable school, no friends, and parents that split, how could she concentrate
on learning?
Indeed, it was a challenge, and she hated studying.
Dakota never really learned how to learn the way you’re supposed to as a kid.
“I thought, Why do I have to go to school on time?
What’s the point when you’re living in Budapest for six months while your stepdad
films Evita and you go to school in your hotel room?”
Johnson downplays the fact that her mom and dad were the Brad and Angie (especially now,
with all the legal battles) of their era, but she realizes her childhood was at least
different from that of the average high schooler.
Her dad was doing Nash Bridges in San Francisco, while her mom and her stepdad were shooting
movies all over the world.
Surely, she loved the travelling and adventure bits.
But there’s a jagged side — or, as Dakota puts it, “a mindfuck" — to refracted fame.
“I feel like you learn how to do school in second grade through fifth grade.
During those years I was never home.”
After years of on-set tutoring and homeschooling, her parents sent her to an all-girls Catholic
boarding high school, which she thought she’d love but turned out to hate.
“I was miserable there.
It was a great school, but girls in that concentration are so horrific, just horrific.”
Instead of having discipline and stability, teenage Dakota was a target of bullying.
Mean Girls isn’t just a movie.
Because her parents’ problems were broadcast in tabloids for her classmates to see, Johnson
had to deal with unwanted and aggressive behaviour.
Eventually, she got her dad to set her free.
Next, it was off to the artsy New Roads School in Santa Monica, where Johnson whiled away
high school sketching.
“I would get so bored after a while.
There are only so many ways you can draw a naked woman or man.
There are only so many penises I can see and draw.”
The hardest part was dealing with the slings and arrows aimed at her family again.
Unfortunately, the bullying continued and intensified, with girls bringing magazine
clippings into school about her parents’ substance abuse issues.
“I think people, especially the press, like to pick on children of famous people, and
I think that’s fucking awful,” she says.
“Things get made up.
And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it as a 16-year-old.
“ There were rumours that Dakota spent that
time in rehab to deal with her own addictions, but she has denied it, which makes perfect
sense.
A couple of years earlier, Johnson realized she was struggling with depression.
“That was when, with the help of professionals, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a thing I can fall
into.’”
She continued, “I guess I have a lot of complexities, but they don’t pour out of
me.
I don’t make it anyone else’s problem.”
Unsurprisingly, at first, she tried to deal with everything in her own way.
Her wildness that was always present now only intensified.
Dakota struggled with the headline-grabbing fame of the clan and would get into all sorts
of trouble, which included getting a series of tattoos that, of course, at the time, was
a strong indicator of a rebellious teenager.
“I didn’t abide by rules very well.
I was like a wild, feral little child.
I didn’t have a problem doing anything.
The secret is I have no shame.”
In her own words, she was a disaster.
And for a long while, the future star thought there was something wrong with her brain.
Later she realized that it just works differently.
During the time she was going to school in Santa Monica, Dakota started her modelling
career.
For the first time in her life, she had a stable address for a few consecutive years.
She was able to move herself and her then-boyfriend to an apartment in West Hollywood following
her high school graduation.
She had applied to a single college, Juilliard in New York, for which she rashly performed
monologues by Shakespeare AND Steve Martin.
“Juilliard and I mutually agreed that it wouldn’t work out,” Dakota recalls.
Back in Los Angeles, she began auditioning, and a break came when she booked what turned
out to be a memorable cameo as Sean Parker’s Stanford one-night stand in The Social Network.
Film was always the best way to engage Johnson, and she escaped to a make-believe world all
so willingly.
Movies she would watch over and over included Mary Poppins, Home Alone, Beetlejuice, and
later all of Bernardo Bertolucci and John Cassavetes
She studied ballet until age sixteen but always imagined a career in acting.
“I thought, this is just what my family does,” she said.
“It’s like, my dad’s a lawyer, so I’m a lawyer.
Except that it doesn’t usually work that way.”
Dakota decided to go into showbiz by herself, without the influence of her family.
Tippi Hedren, her grandma, famous for Hitchcock’s The Birds, allows for the possibility that
it’s the genes.
However, she didn’t push Melanie into films, and Melanie didn’t push Dakota, saying,”
I think neither of us is the type to push.”
They never discussed the negative aspects of the business, though.
Tippi thinks she’s not good at advice.
Still, she didn’t fail to share that it’s important to do different things in life,
to have a sense of balance.
Elaborating on many of the stories about Johnson that keep mentioning she spent 30 days in
a Malibu rehab centre for substance abuse as a teen, she swears it never happened.
“My parents had some problems of their own that put me in a position of having to deal
with very grown-up stuff at a very young age,” says Johnson, obliquely hinting at both of
her parents’ well-documented alcohol issues.
“I needed some help with that, therapy wise.
And in turn, as a child, you trust someone, and then they fuck you over.”
Given all that, why would she follow her parents into the family business?
Dakota thinks there’s a part of her that feels like there is nothing else she can do.
Convincing herself that she is good at what she does took some time.
Finally, she began to pursue the world of make-believe in 2008, but a lack of experience
and a case of famous-daughter syndrome amounted to a self-sabotaging spree.
“I was 18, and I would freak out, a part of me that really didn’t know if I was capable.”
Comedy saved her.
Two years later, she found herself auditioning for Judd Apatow . “Dakota came in to read
for Girls and was amazing, just naturally hilarious,” he said.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have a part for her, but she made a big impression.
At the time, Apatow’s friend Nick Stoller was looking for someone to play Audrey, Jason
Segel’s manic, way-too-young girlfriend in The Five-Year Engagement.
The Apatow/Stoller world revolves around improv, something Johnson had never done in her life
— but she was a natural.
She built that whole character.
That’s when they realized Dakota is going to be a movie star.
Stoller just kept adding scenes for her.
“I’ve had that feeling with Chris Pratt and Mila Kunis 0.13), and I had it with Dakota.
A sense of humour is key.
And she’s really pretty!
To find that in one actress is rare.
It’s like Meg Ryan.”
It is precisely the complexities that came with the wild and hectic childhood that has
propelled her forward in her career.
For instance, in the 2020 film The High Note, Johnson stars as Maggie, an overworked personal
assistant to Grace Davis, played by none other than Tracee Ellis Ross .
Her character is so emotional and so open, but Johnson didn’t want her to get totally
blown over by the wind.
“I think, especially for women, it’s such a hustle all the time.
Maggie’s vulnerable, but it never stops her from going for the thing that is the most
important to her.”
While her co-star in the film, Ross, told the magazine that Johnson “knows where she
is and who she is and isn’t afraid to speak up,” she wasn’t always this assertive.
For a long time, she would do a film and have no say.
She could go into something, and it’ll be one thing, and then it comes out as a totally
different thing.
“As an artist, you’re like, ‘What the f----?’”
She always wanted to have her craft, her artistry, and her ideas respected and tossed around.
Dakota wanted to be part of the process.
It turns out dreams do come true, as the actor began engaging more in producing movies.
Johnson will serve as an executive producer on several films under TeaTime Pictures, a
company she herself co-founded.
Despite success on the big screen, Dakota Johnson sometimes still feels like she’s
figuring things out.
“Sometimes my life can feel so suffocating, like I don’t have a handle on it at all.
But I have such an obsession with making movies that I probably will always do that.
“ As for the press and the pressures of fame,
she revealed there are some days when she can do her thing and be out in the world.
And then there are other days when it’s totally not okay, and she wants to crawl into
a hole and die.
However, as she’s matured, Johnson has, quote, “learned to be comfortable with my
life being in constant flux.”
And that’s all we have for you today.
How would you feel with a rollercoaster of a childhood Dakota had?
Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
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