Dakota Johnson on Finding Humor in ‘Fifty Shades’ : If You Can’t Laugh, ‘You’re ‘F—–, Literally’

Dakota Johnson on Finding Humor in ‘Fifty Shades’ : If You Can’t Laugh, ‘You’re ‘F—–, Literally’

When Dakota Johnson signed on to play Anastasia Steele in the onscreen adaption of Fifty Shades of Grey, she knew she would have to do more than simply bite her lip and be open to the wonders of the Red Room – she would have to make her character relatable.
“I needed Anastasia to be funny,” Johnson, 25, reveals to Elle for its special Women in Hollywood issue.

“If you can’t laugh during a movie like that, you’re f—–. Literally,” she said. “You need to have something that everyone can relate to.”
Humor was not foreign to Johnson pre-Grey: She nimbly ad-libbed a breakup scene alongside Jason Segal in 2012’s The Five-Year Engagement by “thinking about a girl who is pretty vapid,” she explained. “What would matter to her? I said something about wearing his Crocs.”
Johnson didn’t exactly wear Crocs in Fifty Shades, but she donned other accessories to help make the movie a box-office hit. Johnson will once again star alongside Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed.
The director of the first film, Sam Taylor-Johnson, said she was looking for something very specific while casting Anastasia – and Johnson had just that.

“There had to be a sense of wide-eyed, excitable curiosity, but grounded in a worldliness,” Taylor-Johnson told Elle. ” She had to have an inner strength that would carry her through the darkest of moments. I knew straightaway that Dakota was the girl.”

While few details of the upcoming sequel have been released, salary negotiations for both Johnson and Dornan are fully underway and release dates have been tentatively set for Valentine’s Day 2017 and 2018.
But the long wait hasn’t stopped fans from obsessing over the broody couple. Fifty Shades mania has been in full swing since a teaser for the next installment of the series was released this spring.
But if you want to see Johnson onscreen before 2017, you can see catch her in the upcoming film How to Be Single, out Feb. 12, 2016.

“I play a girl who moves to New York under the guise of needing to be independent,” Johnson told Elle of her part in the film. “It’s about the ebb and flow of finding yourself and finding love and why does it matter.”