Dakota Johnson is making her Marvel debut in Madame Web, and naturally, she had some apprehensions going in.
Alongside Sydney Sweeney, Dakota is starring as Cassandra Webb in the upcoming thriller, which is based in Sony’s Spider-Man universe. Set in 2003, the movie centers around Cassandra as she begins to develop clairvoyant powers and must grapple with how to use them.
So with it being Dakota’s first ever superhero movie, it sounds like the filmmaking process brought with it a few new experiences, from big stunts to CGI.
“I got to do a day of stunt driving work, and I’m really good at it, it seems!” Dakota excitedly told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview.
“I mean, I can do some really wild things with a car,” she went on. “I drove an ambulance. I drove a taxicab. I drove everything in the movie — except for flying through the air and out of a building. But other than that, I’m like, ‘Watch out, Tom Cruise.’”
However, despite picking up the stunts quite easily, Dakota confessed that she had serious concerns about another aspect of the movie-making process.
“I’ve never really done a movie where you are on a blue screen,” she told the outlet, referring to the VFX technique commonly used in action and sci-fi movies.
“There’s fake explosions going off, and someone’s going, ‘Explosion!’ and you act like there’s an explosion,” she recalled. “That to me was absolutely psychotic.”
Because she was performing the action-packed scenes with nothing but a blue screen behind her, Dakota said that it all came down to trusting the film’s director, S.J. Clarkson — even when she was a little worried about the end result.
“I trusted her so much,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be good at all! I hope that I did an okay job!’ But I trusted her.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Dakota confessed that she was pretty skeptical about taking the role in the first place.
“I got sent this script, and I was like, ‘I don’t know about me being a superhero,’” she said, admitting that the more she read, the more she felt intrigued by the character of Cassandra.
“I was sort of mystified by her powers,” Dakota explained. “I felt like, ‘Oh, I really would love to see that superhero. I would love to see a young woman whose superpower is her mind.’”
Opening up about how she embodied the part, Dakota said she wanted people to be able to connect with Cassandra, who is a New York City paramedic.
“It was really important to me that she’s really human and grounded in reality, and that her life feels like, ‘Oh, I can relate to that,’” she said, before joking that, for some viewers, relating to a superhero “shooting lasers out of their eyes” might be easier said than done.
“I mean, not for me,” she quipped. “I obviously do that all the time.”
