"You don't have to know anything about anything at all."
In which we cheer Dakota Johnson for trashing (or ... seeming to trash?) the movie she's supposed to be promoting.
Hi again.
Sometimes being a magazine freelancer means finding new ways to convince editors to let me write about my deepest preoccupations in ways they’ll deem fit to publish and pay me for.
Other times, though, it means seeing something in the world and thinking something like: huh, I bet Editor X would let me write about that for Recurring Slot Y (a particular column, for example).
All of which is to say: For this coming weekend’s New York Times Magazine, I wrote a “Screenland” column about the widespread fascination with Dakota Johnson’s “raw,” “authentic,” “chaotic” press tour for her latest film, the superhero flop Madame Web. The piece is now online; read away.
A funny sub-chapter from the writing process: Watching dozens of TikTok highlight reels of people’s favorite recent Johnson Moments, I kept coming across an interview where she says she hasn’t seen Madame Web yet, but “from what I have seen, it looks really good.” I wanted to include this because (a) it’s hilarious, and (b) it set up an ending line that I liked about how we don’t really know our favorite celebrities, even the “candid” ones (“but, from what we see, they look really good”)(get it?).
Anyway, none of these TikTok reels made clear where the interview had originally come from, which I knew meant the line wouldn’t survive fact-checking. So I spent a couple hours emailing TikTokers, asking if they could retrace their steps and find out where they’d originally snipped the footage from. Several of them enthusiastically tried—none of them succeeded! RIP, line I thought was clever and probably would have been cut anyway!
More soon, —Peter