Let’s Hope the Upcoming Fifty Shades Press Tour Is as Awkward as the Last

Jamie and Dakota actually do have chemistry — it’s just the kind that makes everyone else uncomfortable.
The Fifty Shades of Grey press tour was widely billed a disaster, the consensus being that Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson have zero chemistry. “Double Crap: Fifty Shades of Grey Stars Can’t Fucking Stand Each Other,” read one headline on Jezebel; “15 Inanimate Objects With More Chemistry Than Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson,” read another on New York Magazine’s The Cut. (Objects included two slabs of granite and a pair of muddy cleats.) The press tour was awkward and strained, and both actors seemed like they’d rather be corn in feces than the stars of an S&M blockbuster — but, actually, I think there was a spark between them. It just wasn’t a spark of joy.

Press tours are long and tedious, and actors are often asked the same predictable questions over and over. (To be fair, anyone who has interviewed a celebrity has had to, on occasion, ask an obvious question. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.) What seemed to bind Dakota and Jamie was their mutual disdain for that part of the job. Allow an example.

Here’s what their faces looked like when Natalie Morales started in with a sex question on the Today show in July 2014:
At this point, all Morales has said is, “Obviously the movie has, I imagine, a lot of sex” — but it’s enough to fill the actors with dread. She keeps talking because she has a job to do, and now here are the actors’ faces when she’s about halfway through her question (as a rule of thumb, the longer it takes to ask a question, the more awkward the interview):

Finally, Morales lands a point: “How are you guys able to kind of get in the moment?” And now look at them:
Tell me these aren’t the faces of people who’ve gotten whiskey-drunk together and marveled at the stupidity of humanity. A lack of chemistry would be Dakota responding to this question or any others enthusiastically while Jamie responds scornfully, or vice versa. (Think: Anne Hathaway and James Franco hosting the Oscars from different planets.) But they are on the same page; it just happens to be a page that makes everyone else uneasy.

Take this this January 2015 Glamour interview as another example. Do you make this face at someone you hate?
No offense to the woman in the iPad, but the joke is probably on her. (Another fun nugget about this video is that, about 58 seconds in, they confidently declare Donald Trump a submissive.)

In the past two years, press tours have gotten increasingly weird and tense across the board, with interview walkouts and actor-reporter confrontations becoming a regular occurrence (slash, viral opportunity). Even Passengers co-stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt recently ended a radio interview after being asked a sex question, and they are otherwise the sort of stars who act silly as needed.

Still, there’s a pervasive pressure from fans and studios for co-stars to act like they are instant BFFs, just a bunch of goofballs who tell each other fart jokes between takes. Why? How is that the definition of chemistry? Who cares if actors have fun on set? They survived making a movie together — in the case of Jamie and Dakota, a pretty life-changing movie — whether they liked each other or not. Isn’t an authentic expression of their relationship more interesting than a dog-and-pony show?

With the Fifty Shades Darker press tour upon us, one can only hope its stars are as moody and dry-humored as ever, and that they haven’t been media-trained beyond repair to behave like #SquadGoals. It’d also be nice for Jamie and Dakota not to be asked “What’s it like to shoot a sex scene?” or, “Have you read the books?” for the millionth time in the first place, so they don’t feel so bothered out of the gate. They’re actors, after all, not masochists.