Dakota Johnson doesn’t know if Madame Web will be any good, but she hopes she did okay
Johnson also apparently has a secret knack for stunt driving, which is cool
After the release of its weird first trailer, featuring the line “He was in the Amazon researching spiders with my mom before she died,” S.J. Clarkson’s Spider-Man-adjacent Madame Web immediately developed a softly Morbius-esque level of morbid curiosity (a phenomenon we’re now going to call “Morbius Curiosity”). Will this be any good? It seems confident in its oddness, and Clarkson has done good work in the superhero space before, and it seems to have some new ideas about how to make a Spider-Man-adjacent film that Morbius didn’t have, so maybe it will be cool? Either way, we don’t really know what to expect.
And, it turns out, neither does star Dakota Johnson. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Johnson said that Madame Web was her first time working with such a CG-heavy movie (“There’s fake explosions going off and someone’s going ‘explosion!’ and you act like there’s an explosion”), so she says the experience was “absolutely psychotic.” She added that she doesn’t know if “this is going to be good at all,” but she’s hopeful that she at least did a good job. Through it all, though, Johnson trusted Clarkson to know what she was doing and explained that the director “works so hard” and “has not taken her eyes off this movie since we started.”
So she’s optimistic, which isn’t technically in the spirit of Morbius Curiosity, but we’ll take it. Also, while making Madame Web, Johnson apparently discovered that she’s a talented stunt driver, saying she realized she “can do some really wild things with a car” and that she “drove everything in the movie” (including an ambulance and a taxi). Her one regret was that the stunt performers wouldn’t let her be the one to drive a car into a diner in one scene, which she says was “really a bummer,” but she figures that most productions “don’t want to put their lead actor in actual danger, unless you’re Tom Cruise.” Perhaps that means that Madame Web is the start of Dakota Johnson’s new career as an action star? Give her a John Wick, Hollywood! She’s apparently got the chops!