“I Have No Shame” Was Dakota Johnson’s Answer to Whether She Could Handle Playing Ana in Fifty Shades of Grey

In the March 2014 issue of ELLE, Dakota Johnson was 24, freshly cast as Anastasia Steele, and best known as someone’s daughter and the star of a Fox sitcom that got cancelled after 13 episodes. The only question anyone had was whether she could handle the nudity and the BDSM that came with Fifty Shades of Grey. Her full answer: “I don’t have any problem doing anything. The secret is I have no shame.”

Johnson, whose parents are Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and whose grandmother is Tippi Hedren, said inhibition was never the obstacle. Fear of the material was, and she took that as the reason to do it.

“I wasn’t very invested at first,” she said, because the book scared her and she’d never done anything like it. “But that just told me it was something I should do.”

What drew her in wasn’t the sex. “Reading the book, I found myself more interested in the ways they were breaking each other down emotionally than the sex scenes,” she said. “I think there’s a part of a woman that wants to be the thing that breaks a man down.”

The interview ran with her first major fashion cover, under the headline “Meet Dakota Johnson, the star of ’50 Shades of Grey.’” The casting had been announced September 2, 2013, pairing her with Charlie Hunnam, and fans turned on it fast.

Hunnam dropped out weeks later and Jamie Dornan replaced him. Johnson stayed.

For weeks after she got the part, she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, not her father, not her mother, not her grandmother. Her reason: “sometimes your parents are the ones with the biggest mouths of all time.”

Thank you for reading Thought Catalog. Keep up with us on Facebook, or dive into more on our website.