But first is the movie she’s already made: Verity, out this month, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s blockbuster page-turner in which she stars opposite Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. It’s a little Rebecca, a little Basic Instinct, a whole lot of jump scares meant to be consumed in a dark theater surrounded by hilarious friends. “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 phone from New York. “She’s really dry, but she does not miss.”
“I have this deep calling to shift my perspective a bit and maybe have a bit more of a real life”
Is it here that I should say that I did not know quite what I was walking into, that very hot July day? That I wasn’t sure if it would be target practice? Johnson, who a near decade ago was a bubbly ingenue on the brink of superstardom, has since developed a reputation for a certain cool-girl deadpan opacity, a kind of mischievous remove during press appearances. See: talk shows like Ellen (where in 2019 she flatly deflated her host’s aspersions of being left out from her 30th birthday party with: “That’s not the truth, Ellen”) and viral videos like AD’s Open Door tour, where she lied pointlessly about a styled bowl of fruit (“I love limes”; turns out she’s allergic).
She loves a bit, the TV writer Talia Bernstein tells me. Bernstein, a friend of Johnson’s, wrote and starred in the 2024 short film Loser Baby, loosely based on their friends’ lives as east side 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 according to Johnson, her posture toward the press is 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 around with the press and has fun doing it, she says, “because the other side is fucking with me.”
