Despite an entire year of strength and ballet training, Dakota Johnson, during her Variety Actors on Actors conversation with Armie Hammer, describes the crippling self-doubt she faced before the start of filming for “Suspiria.”
She says she “had this f—ing meltdown four days before filming and was like, ‘I can’t do this.'”
“I was in tears in [director Luca Guadagnino’s] office, and I was like, I’m a fraud,” Johnson recalls, explaining how Guadagnino and Tilda Swinton had to convince her that she was worthy of the part.
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This was not the first time Johnson, Swinton, and Guadagnino had worked together, nor was it Johnson’s first experience with self-doubt.
“For my whole life I’ve been railing against myself thinking that someone’s gonna find out that I’m a fraud,” she tells Hammer. “This is a thing that artists do really struggle against, is this feeling that I’m not actually deserving of this job or this career.”
Johnson recalls the first time she worked with Guadagnino and Swinton, when she traveled to the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria to do a read through of “A Bigger Splash.”
“Afterwards I was like, ‘I can’t do this and I’m so sorry for wasting your time, but this is deserving of someone who’s really talented,” Johnson said. “He and Tilda sat me down and were like, ‘You are so okay to do this. You can do this, and this is for you, and that’s why you’re here.”
Watch the full interview below: