Dakota Johnson is making her Marvel debut in Madame Web, and naturally, she had some apprehensions going in.
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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.
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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.
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“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.’”
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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.
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“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.
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“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.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Dakota confessed that she was pretty skeptical about taking the role in the first place.
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“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.
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“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.
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“I mean, not for me,” she quipped. “I obviously do that all the time.”