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Fifty shades of Jamie and Dakota
Los Angeles — The temperature in our Beverly Hills office was getting hot. Not because it was 87 degrees outside, but because the hottest couple on screen these days, Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, were in the house.
The bearded Jamie, 35, arrived in a casual light blue jacket, white t-shirt, black slacks matched with brown shoes. Dakota, 28, was chic in a white side-pleated top with standing collars and a pair of cropped knee-length black pants and black pumps.
Although they arrived separately, they hugged and playfully teased each other when they met. We talked to them individually and discovered more about each other as well as their thoughts on this last installment of the “Fifty Shades” franchise that made both of them household names.
On what Jamie will miss from the “Fifty Shades” experience:
That’s a good question. Every film you do, you create your little family within it and on set and with cast and crew, and I think that’s all the more if you did a trilogy of films with all of the same crew and certainly the same cast. So I think I will miss the cast, I will miss Dakota and yeah, I will miss that experience of going through something as monumental as this trilogy of movies has been.
On what they discovered about each other:
JD: She tries to hide it, but she has a snort laugh. But when she is really tickled, she snorts. Aggressively, and then she can’t stop snorting.
DJ: Jamie does a thing when he's eating. He'll sometimes store food in the side of his mouth and tell a story. But it'll be quite a long story so he just has this ball of food in the side of his mouth for like way too long.
On what people don’t know about them:
JD: I am obsessed with sports. I wanted to play rugby when I was a kid. But I am obsessed with golf. I played golf this morning before I came here, just to try to calm my mind. But it had the opposite effect. I played terribly.
DJ: I would love to marry someone who is supportive and respectful of my job equally as he is of his.
On reactions they get playing these roles:
JD: Well our oldest daughter starts big school in September, so I will be able to give you a far better answer then. But even at Nursery, I am aware of that a little bit and that is the giggly aspect of it. I giggle too. I just find it funny too. Part of me can’t really believe that I did these films. I still have this element going why did they make movies out of those books? But they did and I am in them.
DJ: People have thanked me for helping them feel sexually liberated and I don't think that that's something to thank me for. That's definitely something for Erica, for E.L. James. I was just a conduit. I was just a vessel.
On what Dakota discovered after playing Anastasia:
I've discovered that protecting my privacy is probably the most important job I'll ever have in my life.
On doing research on S&M:
JD: I did quite extensive research before I did the first movie and I went to watch a dominant with his submissive and just to experience firsthand what that was like and what the energy of the room was like. It’s so case sensitive. It’s so different for everybody. Everybody has their own approach on how they like to create that world and how they want that world to be. Some of it is quite serious and feels quite dangerous at times. Then some are very frivolous, giggly and fun. It can be whatever you want it to be and people feel it’s sadistic. What I saw was literally the opposite of that. They were having so much fun and laughing a lot. I am very open to it. I am a very open-minded person and if that is what floats your boat, then more power to you. It didn’t for me personally, but I think the world is fine.
On the learning how to use the kinky sex toys:
JD: There are classes in LA you can take, probably there are classes everywhere. I didn’t know a great deal about it. We had a “kink advisor” on the set with us. He was able to fill me in on about a lot of the apparatus so I would look like I knew what I was doing. So I had a few interesting sessions with him. It was an eye opening experience learning a lot of that stuff.
On questions Dakota asked the “kink advisor”:
I asked everything: How to start doing this is probably the first one. I wanted to know as much as I possibly could. I do my research when I work so it was anything really but Jamie spent more time with him because Anastasia doesn't. My character doesn't really have knowledge about this genre of sex prior to meeting him so.
On Jamie’s idea of a wild night:
Oh God. I deal with two kids under four. The wild nights are few and far between. But in my '20s, I don’t like going out with a plan. I like those nights. I moved to London when I was 20 and there were nights in Surrey where you just stumble around the place, and find these old speakeasy type of bars. The night would just get progressively sillier and sillier until your body couldn’t take it anymore. You get a cab or whatnot. There would be drinking and stuff, but I am not really into the whole stripper scene and stuff. That wouldn’t be on my wild agenda.
On conversations Dakota had with her mother, Melanie Griffith and grandmother, Tippi Hedren about working in Hollywood:
I've spoken about this with my grandmother a lot because she experienced Alfred Hitchcock and that was a terrible thing that she went through. It applies to every single problem that women are talking about now when this happened in the '50s. I was trying to remember exactly what year but it's been happening forever. Yes, we have conversations about it at home but it's not necessarily a great easy thing to talk about. It's difficult. It's hard to think about my grandmother going through this so if I can do something to make a change for younger generations, for future actresses whether they come from me or not, then I will definitely try to do that. — LA, GMA News
