Dakota Johnson, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded in front of an audience at Chapman University, is an actress and third-generation Hollywood star. After a brief but memorable turn in David Fincher’s 2010 masterpiece The Social Network, she shot to fame through a trilogy of risque blockbuster films, released between 2015 and 2018, which were inspired by E.L. James’ bestselling Fifty Shades books. But it has been primarily through indie projects that she has established her artistic bona fides — among them Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash in 2015 and Suspiria in 2018; Michael Schwartz and Tyler Nilson’s The Peanut Butter Falcon in 2019; and, in 2021, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter, in which she plays an overwhelmed young mother who establishes a connection with a woman who was in her shoes decades earlier. Johnson, 32, is generating some of the best reviews of her career for The Lost Daughter. She has also ventured into producing on projects like Cha Cha Real Smooth, in which she also stars, which this week premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and sold to Apple for $15 million, making it the largest sale of the festival so far.
