Nepo Baby of the Week: Everyone’s Wrong About Dakota Johnson’s ‘Madame Web’ Tour

What is it about “Platinum-Grade nepo baby” Dakota Johnson that makes her such a viral clip and quote machine? Best known for the Fifty Shades franchise, 2018’s Suspiria remake, and foreshadowing the downfall of Ellen DeGeneres’s public image, she seems to occupy a specific, almost illegible place in the public imagination. Case in point? The Madame Web press tour, which has forced her to weather questions both predictable and inane (and even a literal earthquake) while breathless headlines try in vain to piece together where, exactly, she’s coming from. Does she hate the movie, or are we just not used to unfiltered celebrity press tours anymore?

These days, it’s rare for a celebrity to actually call out the funhouse discourse that often surrounds them. In the age of endless media training, stars like Johnson and Cillian Murphy (who is famously allergic to both memes and press tours) are a vanishing breed. A messy celebrity press tour is a beautiful thing, but to my eye, Johnson’s has been subject to a lot of decontextualization and misinterpretation. I don’t think she hates Madame Web so much as the brainless machine that made it. The entire ordeal calls to mind a line from Johnson’s recent Saturday Night Live monologue: “I’m just not good at talking to journalists,” she said. “I think the big problem is that I say stuff and then they write it down. And that’s not fair because most of the time, I’m joking.”

As seen during her anxiety-inducing moment with Ellen, Johnson seems allergic to bullshit. When asked last month about a widely memed Madame Web line—“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”—she asked the HuffPost UK reporter why the line had gone viral in the first place. He cheerfully explained that it might’ve been the lack of context, but she pressed further: “Isn’t any sentence out of context, out of context?”

Read more at The Daily Beast.