The Hardest Sex Scene Of The Fifty Shades Trilogy According To Dakota Johnson
The "Fifty Shades" film trilogy skyrocketed Dakota Johnson to worldwide fame — but she also says that filming these notoriously steamy scenes was really tricky. One sequence in particular was, apparently, quite difficult.
In a 2018 interview with Marie Claire, Johnson answered some rapid-fire questions from interviewer Alex Warner, including which sex scene was the biggest challenge to shoot. According to Johnson, one in the third film, "Fifty Shades Freed," was especially challenging — specifically, a scene where her character Anastasia Steele and her then-husband Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) are experimenting with blindfolds and handcuffs.
"The most difficult one by far—I think in all three movies—was a sex scene in the third film where I was handcuffed with my arms and legs to the gate," Johnson told the outlet. "It's like a fence thing that comes down. And I was blindfolded. And it was kind of shocking, because I didn't realize that no matter how prepared or rehearsed I was, when your senses are taken away like that, you can't control the way your nervous system will react. So it was really tricky to navigate that scene. It was kind of difficult." This makes perfect sense; there's really no good way to prepare for a scene like that, although Johnson revealed elsewhere in the interview that she and Dornan did have a way of making these difficult scenes a little easier.
Both Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan had to wear absurd cover-ups while filming the Fifty Shades films — but shots helped
Before we get to their coping mechanisms, Dakota Johnson also revealed that she and Jamie Dornan had to wear completely bizarre costume pieces for their sex scenes to cover themselves as much as possible. Aside from Dornan's strategic covering, Johnson said that the underwear she wore — which only covered the smallest parts, in the end — was basically glued to her.
"Oh yeah, Jamie's little pouch," Johnson said regarding the "modesty wear" she and Dornan had to don during their sex scemes. "It's super not glamorous—it's really unsexy. He wore that, and I had these sort of strapless thongs that had glue on them. It's not glue, but it's sticky. They're, like, basically if it were a nipple pastie, but underwear. But it's only sticky at the top, it's not sticky the whole way. It would also come off because the adhesive would wear out, so then they would superglue it to my body so that it wouldn't fall off. And I would wear two of them. It's not painful, I mean, it's barely anything. But I guess you have some sense of being covered. It's f***ing bizarre."
Okay, so how did Dornan and Johnson "prepare" for their more risqué scenes in the "Fifty Shades" movies? Some of it was technical, including planning for scenes (like, one would imagine, the blindfold-handcuff scene that proved to be difficult). Sometimes, though, they needed liquid courage: "But, if something is very, very difficult, it's sometimes necessary to have a shot of something strong beforehand."
Dakota Johnson apparently didn't love filming sex scenes for the Fifty Shades films
Nothing Dakota Johnson said about the sex scenes in the "Fifty Shades" films sounds ... sexy at all, despite how they look on screen. To that end, Johnson says that in addition to their modesty "pouches" and underwear, the sex scenes were meticulously scheduled and planned, particularly because there were so many — and they had their own schedule during shooting. "If we could do all of the sex scenes in a day or so, that would truly be in the 'Guinness Book of World Records,'" the actress joked. "A lot of it was dependent on the locations, and because we shot the second and third film back to back, the sex scenes were kind of grouped in all together for the most part."
Ultimately, Johnson said that no matter how many sex scenes she and Jamie Dornan had to shoot and how specifically they were scheduled, it didn't actually make it any easier to shoot them when push came to shove. "No, it's never easy," Johnson said of the steamiest and most intimate scenes. "It's not casual and it's not fun. It never got easy."
The "Fifty Shades" trilogy is available on Peacock now.