Dakota Johnson Blew Madame Web's Director Away With Her Stunt Skills
Dakota Johnson is a fascinatingly eccentric celebrity (and I very much mean that as a compliment), so it should come as no surprise that she's also been the most entertaining part of the marketing for "Madame Web." To some extent, the latest entry in Sony's Spider-Man Universe — a movie that /Film's Witney Seibold describes in his review as a "clunky, earnest, and weirdly charming" oddity — seems almost tailor-made for her. The "Fifty Shades of Grey" actor has a peculiar appeal as a public figure, from her handling of "lime-gate" to the wry, understated shade she threw at the meme birthed by the "Madame Web" trailer line, "He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died." The line itself isn't even in the film, which only makes both the meme and Johnson's reaction to it all the more curiously amusing.
Her role in the Webcrawler-free Spider-Man spinoff sees Johnson working with S.J. Clarkson, a British filmmaker who knows her way around the Marvel universe (having previously helmed episodes of the Netflix series "Jessica Jones" and "The Defenders"). Clarkson had a run of bad luck when two of her projects — a "Game of Thrones" prequel show and a new "Star Trek" film — got scrapped back-to-back, but thankfully for her, "Madame Web" made it across the finish line. Clarkson specifically shouted out Johnson for helping to make this happen in an interview with Deadline:
"[A director] asks actors a lot: Can you drive? Can you ride a horse? Can you speak French? And you get to set and they're like, 'Oh, I actually can't, I've never ridden a horse or whatever.' [Johnson] literally was like, 'I can drive.' And I was like, 'Okay, let's see.' And on our first day of stunt rehearsal, she did a 180-stop turn and landed perfectly between the two cones. So, I was like, 'We're gonna be all right.'"
Too bad she didn't use them in the movie
The live-action version of Cassandra "Cassie" Webb makes for an atypical superhero movie protagonist in "Madame Web." Marvel's comic books generally depict Cassandra as an elderly woman with telepathic and clairvoyant abilities who is blind and paralyzed due to her having myasthenia gravis and uses a life support system that resembles a spider-web (hence Cassie's moniker). Sony's movie, on the other hand, instead portrays Cassandra (Johnson) as an ordinary 30-something paramedic who develops psychic powers after a near-death experience. Suffice it to say, stripping your hero of much of what sets her apart from other "Spider-Man" characters is certainly a bold strategy (to borrow a line from a hallowed piece of internet scripture).
As for her driving skills, Johnson admitted she didn't get to do much (if any) of her character's stunts behind the wheel (at the behest of the film's nervous insurance people, no doubt). As she explained on "The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon":
"You know, there's a lot of driving in the movie, and my character, Cassie, does a lot of driving. And I did some stunt training for driving, and I, like, loved it so much. And I learned how to do some crazy things that they actually didn't let me do in the movie, which was so annoying."
That being said... are we quite certain Johnson hasn't been spending her nights silently cruising the streets of Los Angeles listening to tunes in a satin bomber jacket with a big gold scorpion on the back? She's idiosyncratic enough that I wouldn't put it past her. As for "Madame Web," the early critical consensus is that it's as terrible as the trailer would lead you to believe, but I dunno. Like Johnson, there's something almost hypnotically odd about the movie's promos that makes me want to watch it anyway.
"Madame Web" is in theaters now.