Dakota Johnson

Johnson's first screen credit came early — Crazy in Alabama (1999), a small role in a family production, essentially. Not exactly a launching pad. After high school, she worked her way through supporting parts in The Social Network (2010), Beastly (2011), 21 Jump Street (2012), and The Five-Year Engagement (2012) (Perplexity), the kind of roles that keep an actor's name circulating without quite making them a name. That changed when she was cast as Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) — a role she reportedly won out over actresses including Elizabeth Olsen and Felicity Jones (Perplexity). The film was a massive commercial event, and Johnson won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Dramatic Movie Actress for it (Perplexity). Two sequels followed: Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and Fifty Shades Freed (2018), with the trilogy crossing $1 billion at the global box office. What happened after is the more interesting story. Also in 2015, Johnson appeared in Black Mass alongside Johnny Depp and in A Bigger Splash, the Guadagnino drama that gave her something meatier to work with critically. She followed those with How to Be Single (2016), then took a sharp left turn into Guadagnino's Suspiria remake (2018) — a horror film that's genuinely hard to watch in places, which is probably the point — and the thriller Bad Times at the El Royale (2018). The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) showed a softer register entirely, a coming-of-age road movie that earned real affection from audiences and critics who'd written off the Fifty Shades era as her ceiling. The 2020s have seen her work with some of the more interesting directors operating right now: Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter (2021), an adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel that earned significant awards attention, and the Cooper Raiff-directed Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022), which premiered at Sundance. Madame Web (2024), a Sony Spider-Man universe film, landed to a rougher critical reception — hard to say if that signals a course correction ahead or just an outlier in an otherwise eclectic run.