From the top of certain coveted hills in Los Angeles, all you see are your neighbors’ houses. Unless you’re Dakota Johnson—then all you see are trees and sky. “That’s why I love this house so much,” she tells me on a sweltering July afternoon as we settle into the low, soft couches in her living room. She’s barefoot, wearing a clingy cream-lace-trimmed top by Baserange and flowing black crepe Gala trousers from The Row, with a clasped gold chain around each ankle, small gold hoops in her ears, and her hair tied up. She has a new movie, Verity, out this month. Her enormous windows frame her backyard, revealing olive trees and a stretch of cloudless blue. “You can’t really see another house from here,” she says. “It feels sacred.”
Johnson and her nearly two-year-old rescue hound, Tokyo, moved here in January, after she sold her former hideaway—a dreamy, oak-filled midcentury home that had been thoroughly examined and admired thanks to an Architectural Digest feature and a viral video (more on that later). She also left Malibu, where she lived with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin during their eight-year relationship, which ended last June. This—the house, the life stage, the moment, whatever you want to call it—isn’t exactly where the actress thought she’d be at 36. “My life has just unfolded in a surprising way,” she says, as Tokyo curls up on the couch and lets out a sigh. They look like the Egon Schiele painting Woman with Greyhound. It’s hard to imagine a better place to take stock.
She has filled the rooms with her art, books, instruments, and furniture, including plenty of vintage chairs and a black-and-white photograph of a family friend, the late Hunter S. Thompson, beaming in a straw Panama hat above the hallway toilet. The result is warm, comfortable, and elegantly, richly feminine without seeming too professionally designed—which, as it turns out, is a lot like Johnson herself. “I’m obsessed with interior design,” she tells me. And with online auctions. “It’s a bit of a problem…. I go into a black hole,” she says of her bidding habit. Shipments arrive and she has no idea what’s inside. (Most recently: four different chairs.)
Film sets offer another kind of escape. Johnson has just returned from spending the spring on the Italian island of Stromboli and in Rome, producing and starring in Three Incestuous Sisters with director Alice Rohrwacher and costars Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley, and Josh O’Connor. She’s still basking in the bliss of the experience. Stromboli sits off the northern coast of Sicily, with an active volcano that erupts so often (“like every 15 minutes,” she says) that it’s known as the lighthouse of the Mediterranean. The cast swam in the ocean every day; Buckley and O’Connor hiked the volcano every morning. The shoot itself “was a deeply soulful, creative experience,” Johnson says—the kind of thing she joined the industry for: a safe space full of artists feeling free.
While filming in Rome, she lived around the corner from Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele and would call him a few times a week to say she was coming over for a home-cooked dinner. They’ve been close friends for over a decade. “She is family,” Michele tells me on a call from Rome. There’s a sweetness and elegance to her, Michele says, along with an exuberance that can’t be faked. “She has this gift in the way she looks at you, the way she moves, the way she approaches things. She’s the most natural person I’ve met in this business.” She’s also a “really brave artist,” he adds. “Always open, and if she believes in you, she’s really easy.”
Three Incestuous Sisters is inspired by a 2005 illustrated novel by Audrey Niffenegger that had a very limited printing (Johnson’s copy is the first I’veI’ve actually seen it. The story is a spooky take on the Judgment of Paris: three sisters—a wild-haired brunette, a blonde, and a redhead—live happily away from society until a man shows up and has the nerve to fall in love with only one of them. Johnson plays the redhead. Until a few days ago, her hair reached her waist. “It was touching my belly button and getting stuck in my pants,” she tells me, wide-eyed, grabbing the ends of her newly chest-length hair. She cut it after Vogue’s Tonne Goodman encouraged her on the set of her cover shoot. “I was like, alright, it’s a bit much, a little culty.” (Michele called the look “very LA… sort of a nice urban mermaid.”) You can tell she misses it a little.
Johnson started her production company, TeaTime, with one of her best friends, former Netflix executive Ro Donnelly, and brought Niffenegger’s book to Rohrwacher. They developed it together for two and a half years (the film is due in 2027). “She is just an absolute genius,” Johnson says of the director. The admiration is mutual: Dakota “has an aura of mystery and enchantment,” Rohrwacher writes to me in an email. “It’s impossible not to be captivated by the way she looks at the world.”
Johnson describes the typical TeaTime set as “womb-like” and “a protective maternal space.” It probably goes without saying that this isn’t typical of Hollywood, where an ever-shrinking group of men pressure their creative counterparts over budgets, timelines, tax credits, and recycled IP. But Johnson and Donnelly want to reshape their corner of the film industry into a place where artists feel seen and supported. “In the beginning, the ambitions were so huge, it was like, I want to be the first female-founded indie film studio,” Johnson tells me, but a slate of smaller movies (Splitsville, Daddio, Cha Cha Real Smooth) has let her work the way she likes. Donnelly later tells me how, at one point on set in Italy, Johnson turned to her in disbelief and said, “‘Can you believe we get to do this?’ I’m like, I can’t, but surely you can. You grew up on set!”
That’s the point. “I’ve had experiences where people feel forgotten or lost or not taken care of or not seen on set, or just undervalued, and I don’t like anyone to feel that way,” Johnson says. She has spoken before about how, in her view, things went sour during the making of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy because of what she has described as bad oversight, and how in her career she has seen a script twisted into a different film than the one she thought she’d signed on for. She never wants anyone on a TeaTime project to feel that way. Her belief in the power of the creative process borders on religious. “When people feel valued and safe to explore their minds, magic happens,” she says, leveling her gaze at me. “The way it went with Three Sisters, I would be okay if that was the last movie I make.”
But first comes 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, and a whole lot of jump scares meant to be enjoyed 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,” Hathaway says by phone from New York. “She’s really dry, but she does not miss.”
“I have this deep calling to shift my persMaybe I should step back and be a bit more real. Should I mention that I had no idea what I was getting into that sweltering July day? That I wasn’t sure if it would be target practice?
Johnson, who nearly a decade ago was a bubbly newcomer on the verge of superstardom, has since built a reputation for a certain cool-girl deadpan mystery—a kind of playful detachment during press appearances. Think: talk shows like Ellen, where in 2019 she flatly shut down her host’s claim of being left out of her 30th birthday party with “That’s not the truth, Ellen,” and viral videos like AD’s Open Door tour, where she lied for no reason about a styled bowl of fruit (“I love limes”; turns out she’s allergic).
She loves a bit, 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 attitude 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 messes with the press and has fun doing it, she says, “because the other side is fucking with me.”
The result has made her more beloved for playing herself than for just about any of her onscreen characters. “The word that comes to mind in general with Dakota is intriguing,” says Tig Notaro, who directed Johnson in 2022’s Am I OK? “That’s a huge strength.” Lena Dunham emails: “It’s hard to meet people who don’t do the Hollywood ‘I love you.'” (The pair first met when Johnson auditioned for Girls at 19—”It was clear she was going to be something wildly specific and massive,” Dunham writes—and they were later reconnected via a “matchmaking session” orchestrated by Taylor Swift.) “That’s a hard trick to pull off in this town. She wears her success very lightly and she doesn’t give a fuck in the right ways, yet cares deeply.”
An example. Johnson and Martin saw their breakup go public a little over a year ago, which had to be excruciating for someone as private as Johnson. (“I am obsessed with people not knowing where I am or what I’m doing,” she tells me within minutes of our meeting. “I’m far too porous and sensitive and present. I don’t—I can’t deal.”) There was a fair amount of media attention around her rumored relationship with another musician, Tucker Pillsbury, who is 28 and performs under the moniker Role Model (small world: Pillsbury is also starring in Dunham’s forthcoming Netflix rom-com Good Sex, opposite Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo). In late July, Pillsbury began performing an unreleased track, “Love I You,” featuring Johnson’s voice in a flirtatious call-and-response. But by August rumors emerged that they were no longer dating. At one point in our time together, I ask if she wants to talk about her current romantic status. “I don’t want to say anything about that,” she says, politely. Though when she mentions an openness to directing more music videos (she directed Coldplay’s video for “Cry Cry Cry” in 2020), we have the following exchange:
“Well, you do know a lot of musicians.” (Nota bene: When she first appeared on the cover of Vogue, in 2015, she was dating Matthew Hitt, from the band Drowners.)
“They like me. I don’t know what to say.” Beat. “And I like them.”
“What’s not to like?”
“A lot!””A lot.” A burst of laughter. “Tricky motherfuckers.”
Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh in Verity, a struggling writer who moves into the home of a mysteriously ill but far more successful novelist, Verity Crawford (Hathaway), to help finish a bestselling thriller series. She finds more than she expected—including a mutual attraction to Verity’s tormented husband, played by Hartnett. “I think I’d maybe thought that Lowen would initially feel a little bit more like the girl next door,” Hathaway tells me, “but—Dakota’s kind of like the panther next door. She’s actually very cozy and lovable, but she has, unmistakably, very, very powerful jungle cat energy.”
She comes by that honestly. Tippi Hedren, Johnson’s maternal grandmother, tormented by Alfred Hitchcock’s abuse on The Birds, famously devoted her life to rescuing big cats (lions, tigers, yes, panthers, and more), first at her Hollywood home and later at her ranch, Shambala, in Acton, California. (The 96-year-old Hedren still lives at Shambala, Johnson says, though there are fewer cats these days: “There might be nine now; there used to be, like, 60.”) For those unfamiliar with this branch of Hollywood history, Hedren’s daughter is Melanie Griffith, who married Don Johnson (twice), and they had Dakota. “One of the things that’s very, very cool is that [Hedren, Griffith, and Johnson] are all iconoclasts,” Hathaway says. “They’re not really similar to each other. They’re each their own thing.” Johnson, Hathaway says, handles her gilded lineage “beautifully, actually. I think she does it as well as it can be done, maybe the best of all.”
It wasn’t so easy being Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson’s kid, though Johnson doesn’t complain. Her parents divorced early and shared custody across film and TV sets in Colorado and California and beyond, with Dakota and a nanny and a tutor and her half brother running between them. She bounced around schools, too, without a stable grounding in homework or being in the classroom. Anyway—she wanted to be an actress. “Rules are really tough for me,” Johnson says, smiling. Besides, “it just became such a dangerous place, going to school.”
She’s referring to the cliquey adolescent behavior that would be familiar to any middle school girl—but also to episodes like entering a classroom to see her teacher reading a tabloid detailing her mother’s addiction struggles. To this day she loathes celebrity gossip and the paparazzi who fuel it, especially the ones who treat her like prey. Various modalities of therapy have helped—”I’m deeply interested in psychology,” she says, especially the work of Carl Jung—as has a solid network of friends and chosen family. Johnson says she met Riley Keough at age 15, who, as Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter and Elvis’s granddaughter, fully understood what she was going through. They’re still close.
Her parents wanted her to go to college; she was determined to focus on acting, and took modeling jobs to pay her rent while auditioning. And then came a small breakout role in David Fincher’s The Social Network, and not long after, Fifty Shades of Grey, which shot her into the stratosphere. Celebrated indies (A Bigger Splash, The Lost Daughter, Materialists) and big studio movies (Bad Times at the El Royale, How to Be Single, Madame Web) came calling. It’s possible that sometimes she wishes that she hadn’t answered some of those calls. But she never wishes she’d done anything else as a career.
She’s been reflecting on all of it. “I’ve worked back-to-back for so long that now I have this deep calling to shift my perspective a bit and maybe have a bit more of a real life,” she says. “I’ve been gone for, like, 20 years. The people in my life are so used to me leaving for months at a time.” She talks about doShe’s making fewer films, giving herself room to grow outside of work. She “loves” passion in her life—she says this a few times. I wonder if full-on passion clashes with her cool, distant image, and it’s the first time I see her get ruffled. “No. I care deeply about a lot of things. I care deeply. I wouldn’t call myself cool. What does that even mean?” I don’t know, I say. I didn’t think being cool was necessarily a bad thing. “I just want to be authentic,” she says simply. “I want to unfold and unfold and really lovingly embrace this life.” That includes having a family of her own. She wants children. “I really do. I didn’t expect to be this age and at this point in my life, but for whatever reason, that’s the universe’s plan. So I would love that. I hope it happens for me. I’ve always felt, especially in the last few years, that there’s a soul that wants to come through. And I hope I’m lucky enough to make that happen.” On the set of The Three Incestuous Sisters, Donnelly, Buckley, and Ronan all had their babies with them. “It’s hard to be around my best friends, even on set, and everyone has their baby and is starting families, and things turned out differently than I thought,” Johnson says quietly. “But it’s okay. I’m hopeful for that. I also just keep learning more and more and becoming a stronger woman.” What does that look like? Her friends all mention how much she loves being at home, whether it’s hers or theirs. She just finished the TV room in this house, she says, and can’t wait to use the projector to watch movies; she’s thinking about getting a popcorn machine, mostly for the smell. She goes to friends’ houses to cook dinner together. She takes care of herself with herbal remedies, long baths, and sleeping in when her schedule allows. She rides horses, spends time with her siblings, and goes to a house she owns in Colorado to be in nature and away from the bustle of Los Angeles. “Just low-key,” she says. She knows success brings unexpected personal effects: there’s this thing that happens on set, she tells me, when you have this really intense connection to the material and then you finish filming, and everyone packs up and goes home. It’s shattering, she says, it’s the very worst part. “I’ve felt that kind of heartbreak I don’t even know how many times now in my life,” she says. “It’s like leaving summer camp. It’s so devastating. And I don’t know how much more heartbreak my heart can handle.” Tokyo, who has been moving between her bouclé dog bed and Johnson’s lap, curls up against her waist like an asterisk. Johnson kisses her snout. “Maybe spending a little more time just existing as a human is what I’ll be doing.” In this story: hair, Mark Townsend; makeup, Georgie Eisdell; manicurist, Emi Kudo; tailor, Susie Kourinian. Produced by GS World Media. Set Design: Kelly Infield. Visuals Editor: Paige Viti.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on Dakota Johnsons October 2026 Vogue cover story covering her experience filming the thriller Verity settling into a new home and her hopes for the future
Beginner Questions
Q What is Verity about
A Its a thriller based on Colleen Hoovers bestselling novel Dakota plays Verity a famous author who is left unable to speak or move after an accidentbut something about her isnt what it seems
Q Why did Dakota Johnson want to star in Verity
A She was drawn to the dark twisted story and the challenge of playing a character who is mostly silent but still terrifying
Q Did Dakota enjoy filming Verity
A Yes She said it was intense but fun and she loved working with the director and cast The creepy atmosphere made it exciting to shoot
Q Where did Dakota move to
A She settled into a new home in Los Angeles She said it finally feels like a real sanctuary for her and her family
Q What are Dakotas hopes for the future
A She wants to keep taking risky interesting roles spend more time with her family and maybe do more producing behind the scenes
Advanced Questions
Q What was the hardest part of playing Verity
A Dakota said staying still and communicating only through her eyes and small movements was tough She had to act with her whole body while barely moving
Q How did she prepare for such a dark role
A She read the book closely worked with the director on Veritys backstory and practiced staying in a tense quiet headspace between takes
Q Did filming Verity affect her mentally
A She admitted some scenes were draining so she used breaks to resetlistening to music walking or calling home She made sure to leave the character on set
Q What does she love most about her new home
A The quiet She said its a place where she can cook read and just be normalno red carpets or cameras
Q What practical advice does she have for settling into a new home
A Take your time Dont rush to decorate Fill it with things you love and make one room feel finished