Dakota Johnson Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Sony Pictures
As the daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, Dakota Johnson certainly had some advantages growing up, but she doesn’t want to be called a nepo baby.
In a Wednesday, February 7, interview with Hoda Kotb on Today, Kotb asked Dakota about the term, and the 34-year-old actress made her opinion clear. “When that first started I found it to be incredibly annoying and boring,” she said. “If you’re a journalist, write about something else. That’s just lame. So the opportunity to make fun of it, I jumped at.”
That opportunity came on Saturday Night Live, which Dakota hosted for the second time just two weeks ago. In a Please Don’t Destroy video, Dakota met with John Higgins and Martin Herlihy — sons of SNL legends Steve Higgins and Tim Herlihy — and after the group traded jabs, they struck a “nepo truce” before going right back to roasting each other.
It’s not exactly unusual for the daughter of two actors to poke fun at the idea of nepo babies, but on Today, Dakota also explained how she was forced to make it on her own. Her father made a deal with her and her siblings that he would continue to support them financially if they chose to go to college, but that’s not what Dakota wanted for herself. Instead, she went out on her own to pursue acting.
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She got modeling jobs to support herself through the early audition process but still struggled to make ends meet. “I definitely had moments where I couldn’t afford groceries and things like that and needed to ask my mom to help me,” she recalled. “She was the nice one.”
Melanie Griffith, Dakota Johnson and Don Johnson. Lars Niki/Corbis via Getty Images
While Dakota may have been cut off, it hasn’t strained her relationship with Don, 74. She has since said she understood why, as her dad put it, he took his daughter “off the payroll.” College just wasn’t in the cards for someone who knew she was born to act. “I couldn’t wait because I grew up on set. My parents were always working with amazing artists, and I just loved it,” she told W magazine in 2022.
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Fourteen years after her first adult role in The Social Network, it’s safe to say Dakota has made it. She broke out in 2015 as Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades of Grey movies and is now doing the rounds to promote Madame Web, a Marvel film slated for release on Wednesday, February 14.