When it comes to acting dynasties, you’d have to work hard to find someone less connected than Dakota Johnson - granddaughter of Tipp Hedren, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and step-daughter to Antonio Banderas.
But if you were under the assumption that has made things easy for the actor, you’d be wrong. In her cover interview with ELLE UK, Johnson shared that the path to fame didn’t come easy - and it didn’t always come subsidised either.
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Speaking to her friend and co-star in Materialists, Johnson revealed: ‘I was bad at basic school stuff because I never learnt time management or did my homework. I enjoyed English. I was good at Spanish, I was not at math. I did visual arts, and then at one point they had a pseudo-theatre program that I was a part of, and then I got kicked out of it because I abandoned my schoolwork and started failing classes.’
After graduations, she applied to renowned New York performing arts school Juilliard, but didn’t get in.
‘That f*cking process was so awful and terrifying,’ she said. ‘When you get accepted for an audition, it’s a two-day long chorus-line thing. You’re supposed to get called back for a second audition, and I didn’t. It was fine, I really didn’t want to go to college. And because Juilliard felt so small – the idea of being in a classroom with the same group of people, and figuring out how to be a human in that environment, after growing up surrounded by so many different kinds of people and immersed in different cultures through travelling all over… It just felt really wrong to lock myself in one place.’
She added: ‘I didn’t get in and my dad cut me off because I didn’t go to college. So, I started auditioning. I think I was 19 when I did The Social Network, and then little jobs and stuff after that…’
Asked by Pascal if it was a ‘scary year’ after leaving high school, Johnson added: ‘For a couple of years it was hard to make money. There were a few times when I’d go to the market and not have money in my bank account or not be able to pay rent, and I’d have to ask my parents for help – I’m very grateful that I had parents that could help me and did help me. But it certainly was not fun. The auditioning process, as you know, is the f*cking worst.’
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