Dakota Johnson On Having Enjoyable Taking pictures The Thriller “Verity,” Settling Into A New House, and Her Hopes For the Future | Vogue’s October 2026 Cowl Story

But first is the film she’s already made: Verity, out this month, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s blockbuster page-turner by which she stars reverse Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. It’s just a little Rebecca, just a little Basic Instinct, a complete lot of bounce scares meant to be consumed in a darkish theater surrounded by hilarious pals. “Michael Showalter, the director, would give me direction that was so extremely camp, and that’s not really me as an artist,” Johnson says. “But it was so fun, and our references and guidelines were all these erotic thrillers that people are like, Okay, this is ridiculous, but I’m enjoying myself.”

“I was so delightfully surprised to discover that Dakota is one of the funniest people,” says Hathaway by telephone from New York. “She’s really dry, but she does not miss.”

Is it right here that I ought to say that I didn’t know fairly what I used to be strolling into, that highly regarded July day? That I wasn’t positive if it might be goal apply? Johnson, who a close to decade in the past was a bubbly ingenue on the point of superstardom, has since developed a fame for a sure cool-girl deadpan opacity, a form of mischievous take away throughout press appearances. See: speak reveals like Ellen (the place in 2019 she flatly deflated her host’s aspersions of being overlooked from her thirtieth birthday celebration with: “That’s not the truth, Ellen”) and viral movies like AD’s Open Door tour, the place she lied pointlessly a couple of styled bowl of fruit (“I love limes”; seems she’s allergic).

She loves a bit, the TV author Talia Bernstein tells me. Bernstein, a pal of Johnson’s, wrote and starred within the 2024 quick movie Loser Baby, loosely based mostly on their pals’ lives as east facet LA creatives, which Johnson directed. “She’s sillier than most people know,” says Bernstein. “I’ve been at so many small gatherings with her where she’s putting on a dance or changing into a costume…. She likes to laugh.” But based on Johnson, her posture towards the press is much less a “bit” than a survival tactic. “ ‘So, Dakota, you bite the bed in this film,’ ” she intones, imagining a journalist quizzing her about Verity, “ ‘do you bite the bed during sex?’ ” She fucks round with the press and has enjoyable doing it, she says, “because the other side is fucking with me.”