Dakota Johnson Blames ’50 Shades of Grey’ Author EL James for the Movies Being ‘Very Different’ From What She Expected: ‘It Was Tricky’

usmagazine.com:

Pointing fingers. Dakota Johnson claimed there were struggles behind the scenes of Fifty Shades of Grey, the BDSM romance trilogy she starred in from 2015 to 2018.“I’m a sexual person, and when I’m interested in something, I want to know so much about it,” Johnson, 32, told Vanity Fair in a feature published on Tuesday, June 28. “That’s why I did those big naked movies.”She added, “I signed up to do a very different version of the film we ended up making.”The erotic movies followed Johnson as Anastasia Steele, a grad student who finds herself in a relationship with tortured billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan).When asked what the “problem” was behind the scenes, Johnson blamed a “combo” of the studio and directors (Sam Taylor-Johnson directed the first and James Foley did the two sequels) throughout the three films. “It was also the author of the books,” she alleged.E.L.

James penned Fifty Shades as Twilight fan fiction before it went viral, and the England native, 59, adapted her work to be an original series in 2011, selling over 125 million copies worldwide.

With such a massive fanbase, James (real name is Erika Mitchell) was welcomed as a producer on the films.“She had a lot of creative control, all day, every day, and she just demanded that certain things happen,” Johnson explained. “There were parts of the books that just wouldn’t work in a movie, like the inner monologue, which was at times incredibly cheesy.

It wouldn’t work to say out loud. It was always a battle. Always. When I auditioned for that movie, I read a monologue from Persona [a 1966 Ingmar Bergman film] and I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be really special.’”Johnson was 23 when she was cast opposite Charlie Hunnam and Closer playwright Patrick