To me, Dakota Johnson has always had a sort of nondescript prettiness. Like, when I’m looking at photos of her, I think, “Yes, she is quite pretty,” but when I’m just trying to remember what she looks like, I can’t. She’s just sort of unremarkable. Which works for her Fifty Shades character, Anastasia Steele, who is supposed to be the sort of boringly pretty everywoman in which women can see themselves. Dakota covers the February issue of Vogue to promote the new Fifty Shade Darker movie, the sequel to the widely successful and critically panned Fifty Shades of Grey. Vogue made her get a makeover! And it doesn’t really work. I suspect they were trying to give her that flat-ironed rock-and-roll look that they gave Sandra Bullock a while back. But the bangs ruin it. The bangs are for the movie, although they’ve finished filming so I hoped that Dakota would just grow them out, for the love of God. Anyway, you can read Vogue’s profile of Dakota here. Some highlights:

She doesn’t hate Fifty Shades: “I’m truly proud of it. It’s a cool story, and I think it’s different, and different is what I’m all about.”

The rumors about hating or loving Jamie Dornan: “We hate each other and we’re having an affair, so everybody’s right. How about that?”

Nudity on film: “Nudity is really interesting for an actor. Jamie and I worked so incredibly closely for so long. There were no inhibitions, and it was very honest, very trusting. But I mean, what a gamble! What if he had turned out to be a total d-ck? There’s no makeup. There are no clothes to tell you a bit about the story. There’s no jewelry to give you a clue about social status. So it becomes purely about the performance. Will I stop doing nude scenes when my boobs start sagging? I don’t know. Maybe I have more of a European mind-set about these things. I don’t want to see someone wearing a bra and underwear in a sex scene. Let’s be honest about it. People are naked when they f–k.”

She started going to therapy when she was three: “The whole shebang. All the help you can get.” She had to contend with her parents’ divorce and their well-publicized struggles with drugs and alcohol. “I was so consistently unmoored and discombobulated. I didn’t have an anchor anywhere.” School was a challenge, and she hated to study. “I never learned how to learn the way you’re supposed to as a kid. I thought, Why do I have to go to school on time? What’s the point when you’re living in Budapest for six months while your stepdad films Evita and you go to school in your hotel room? I was a disaster, and I thought for so long that there was something wrong with my brain. Now I realize that it just works in a different way.”

The character of Ana Steele. “This woman is a badass. She’s hyperintelligent and hypersexual and very tough and very loving, and her character has so many different aspects that don’t normally make sense in one person. I tried to amplify them all.”

She won’t bad-mouth BDSM: Johnson has developed a deep admiration for BDSM, which she feels is still vulnerable to ignorance and scorn. “First of all, there are some very chic avenues in BDSM. It can be very beautiful and tasteful, and the materials can be luxurious. It’s not like being on Hollywood Boulevard and walking by a ball-gag store. But what I admire is the bravery and the honesty of people who get down with it, who aren’t afraid to say that they need something a bit more in order to get off. America is still so sexually oppressed. Isn’t God’s gift to humans the orgasm?”

[From Vogue]

I appreciate her sex-and-kink positive stance and I hope Jamie Dornan got the same talking points for this promotional tour too, because the last time around, he often sounded very judgmental and shame-y towards the community he was trying to represent. Everybody’s different, and as long as everyone’s a consenting adult, why judge? As for Dakota’s defense of Ana as “hyperintelligent”… no, she’s not. The character is not, I mean. Dakota has every right to defend Ana, of course, but the character as written is an absolute dumbass.

Photos courtesy of Patrick Demarchelier / Vogue.