Class act
50 Shades star hits Toronto for Black Mass featuring Johnny Depp
Julianne Moore walks the red carpet at Roy Thomson Hall Sunday night, ahead of the Toronto International Film Festival screening of Freeheld, which also stars Ellen Page. Moore won an Oscar for her role in Still Alice, which premiered at TIFF last year.
In these days of 50 shades of celebrity craziness, rising star Dakota Johnson has a motto that helps her retain her sanity — or not — as the occasion demands.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” she says with a smile, settling into a chair for a Star interview Sunday at TIFF.
The motto was coined by the late Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who was a close friend of the family, which includes her actor parents Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith.
“I constantly try to subscribe to that philosophy,” Johnson, 25, says.
“It helps keeps me sane, or insane. You just accept it, and move on.”
Learning to roll with whatever comes her way is helping her to negotiate this year’s sudden rush of fame (or notoriety) as female lead Anastasia “Ana” Steele in 50 Shades of Grey, the erotic novel adaptation that inspired heavy breathing worldwide.
She’ll start work “some time next year” on Fifty Shades Darker, the second film of a planned trilogy, expected in 2017.
In the meantime, she’s at TIFF with Black Mass, the Scott Cooper-directed biopic of Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, the brutal gangster who ruled South Boston by fear and blood during the 1970s.
Johnny Depp plays Bulger, and Johnson plays his wife Lindsey, and she does so with such ferocity, she made a huge impression on both Depp and Cooper. As she proved in 50 Shades, she confronts aggressive males on her own terms, and in Black Mass, Depp’s Bulger looks positively vampiric.
“I think the moment when Jimmy Bul- ger walks into that house, there begins this sort of definition of the man — and that’s purely Dakota,” Depp marvels in a separate interview.
“How she responds, how she talks to him, in a way that nobody talks to him. So she was integral, very important, and I thought she knocked it right out of the park.”
Cooper adds his own praise of Johnson: “What’s interesting is that she’s 25, but she feels like she’s an old soul, with a maturity beyond her age that I think really quite nicely works with Jimmy Bulger.”
That’s pretty heavy stuff to live up to. The Texas-born Johnson, who is dressed for the interview in a long sleeved knee-length black dress with black boots, prefers to just keep letting the weirdness roll:
Scott Cooper says he chose you for the role of Johnny Depp’s wife in Black Mass because he liked your combination of “sweetness and earthiness.” Do you agree with that description of you?
That’s very kind of him. I don’t know. I feel like it’s a weird thing if I would agree with that. I probably wouldn’t describe myself that way, but that’s the lovely thing about directors, especially Scott: They see special parts of people. You have a couple of incredible scenes with Johnny, where you really let his character Jimmy know what you think. Where those scenes hard to do?
They were hard emotionally. It was a very heavy day. The atmosphere was very thick and it’s rough materi- al. It’s a very devastating situation, so it was a difficult day, but I can’t imagine doing it with anybody else. You’re surrounded by tough male characters in Black Mass, with other actors including Joel Ed- gerton, Benedict Cumberbatch and Kevin Bacon. Did you have any trouble finding your way into the story?
I didn’t have to negotiate my way in, which is often the case. Scott and I met and we just sort of understood each other and he asked me if I would do the movie and I was so thrilled. I was beyond honoured and excited and I felt that I had finally been accepted into a secret club — the Scott Cooper secret club with cool actors. I love his other films, including Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace. The biggest thing I loved about this specific sort of crime story is that the women are as equally tough as the men. What would a woman see in a man like Whitey Bulger?
That’s what I was trying to figure out. I think he shared a side of him- self with her and only her, and I think he loved their child more than anything. I think that was the one thing that really got him, and then when they lost the child it was just the most devastating thing and completely shut him down. Would you ever want to play a more passive female role, just as an acting exercise?
Maybe one day, but it depends. I feel like it would probably be more of a period piece if I did that. We were just in Venice with two movies, Black Mass and also A Bigger Splash, and I had never been to Venice before.
All of the 15th Century and 16th Century architecture really just got my heart thumping. So I was thinking that would be quite beautiful to play something in that era. Black Mass opens in wide release this week.