If you’ve heard one thing about the new superhero film “Madame Web,” it’s almost certain what you heard is that it’s bad. Really bad. “How’d this get made?” bad. Twelve percent on Rotten Tomatoes bad. “People reading reviews and canceling their tickets” bad. If you’ve heard a second thing about “Madame Web,” it’s probably that Dakota Johnson, the film’s star, seems not only fully aware of how bad the movie is but also incapable of hiding this awareness, even during publicity appearances notionally arranged for her to promote the product. These appearances have threatened to eclipse the film itself: Here is a flop so bad that even its star is winkingly trashing it.
It is true that, if you click through clips of Johnson’s recent appearances, you will not get the impression of an actor with a deep well of positive regard for the movie she is talking about. This is partly because of Johnson’s signature affect: Often, when being interviewed, about “Madame Web” or anything else, she radiates a profound lack of interest in the chummy conventions of celebrity P.R. There is a part she is meant to be playing, but she often seems reluctant to play it; instead, she comes across as both puzzled and bored by the whole ritual, and unwilling to pretend otherwise in the name of politesse. (Something similar could be said of her performance in “Madame Web,” in which her delivery of the film’s wooden dialogue seems to come with a trace of a smirk.)
On this press tour, though, it goes beyond mere affect. If the joke is that the film is brain-dead slop, she looks thrilled to play along. A few weeks ago, in a “Saturday Night Live” monologue, she cheerfully described it as a superhero movie starring Sydney Sweeney — “so, kind of like if A.I. generated your boyfriend’s favorite movie.” On “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” when asked what superhero backstory viewers would need in order to enjoy “Madame Web,” Johnson assured Meyers there was none required; in fact, she added, laughing, “You don’t have to know anything about anything at all to watch this movie.” Then she kept spinning out the bit: “You don’t got to know nothing. It’s great for America.” “You know nothing? Come see our movie.”
There were other moments, none especially pointed on their own but hard to ignore once woven together by pop-culture obsessives. She told Entertainment Weekly that she found the experience of filming against a blue screen “absolutely psychotic.” She told The Wrap that the script underwent “drastic changes” from the version that initially persuaded her to sign on. She told Meyers her Gen Z castmates annoyed her and, in an interview with E! News, speculated that they excluded her from their group chat. She told a radio program that she hadn’t seen the movie yet and didn’t know if she ever would. Throughout, the fact that “Madame Web” exists, and that she stars in it, seemed above all like a source of amusement to her.
Pop-culture discourse has eaten this up. A representative selection of reactions: “Yes, Marvel’s ‘Madame Web’ Is a ‘Schlocky, Janky’ Disaster, but Dakota Johnson’s Press Tour Is a Joy.” (The Guardian.) “Johnson Seems to Be Less Than Thrilled With ‘Madame Web,’ and We Love It.” (AV Club.) “Dakota Johnson’s ‘Madame Web’ Press Tour Was the Real Movie.” (Jezebel.) There are many more where these came from and similar sentiments ricocheting all over TikTok. Johnson’s movie is flopping, but her public image is more beloved than ever.
I, too, got a kick out of watching this unfold. So much celebrity culture is incredibly stale, especially when it comes to the cinematic-superhero-industrial complex. The actors who appear in these films trot around a circuit of similar press stops, saying similar things about their similar performances in similar movies. They’re smiling; they’re happy to be here; they’re so excited to talk about this project. There’s something cheering about watching Johnson bring some irrepressible authenticity to a fakery-clogged machine.
You can’t help noticing that it’s also P.R. genius. As “Madame Web” became the subject of a nationwide roasting, what better move than to shrug and join in? Johnson never quite said the movie was bad, but she did seem to be winking at the audience: You know it’s a stinker, I know it’s a stinker, I know that you know, you know that I know. Eventually she tipped into earnestness, telling Bustle that while the poor reception wasn’t pleasant, “I can’t say that I don’t understand.”
It’s not as if this kind of thing is even necessarily bad for a movie. Sometimes it seems almost helpful, as when feverish gossip about behind-the-scenes drama on the set of “Don’t Worry Darling” appeared to help it at the box office. But even if that’s not the case for “Madame Web,” it’s fine for Johnson: She’s still that partygoer who manages to make anything look cool, even tripping on the carpet and spilling Champagne down her shirt. Her conspiratorial smile lets you feel like her collaborator: It’s not humiliating if you’re both laughing. The trick might be catching on. In her own “S.N.L.” monologue, Sydney Sweeney happily joked that “you might have seen me in ‘Anyone but You’ or ‘Euphoria.’ You definitely did not see me in ‘Madame Web.’”
Moves like these are especially well suited to the moment, when we track celebrities not just as artists but as media personalities, looking for people to cheer specifically for how they navigate the obstacle course of fame. This has long benefited Johnson, whose star power radiates just as much from press appearances as from film roles — and from the suggestion that she is something of a lovable chaos agent. In 2019, she had another viral moment, this time on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”: DeGeneres made an offhand reference to not having been invited to Johnson’s birthday party, but Johnson insisted — and kept insisting, in a deadpan refusal to let it go — that DeGeneres had in fact received an invitation. The moment was indeed awkward, puncturing the norms of daytime TV in a way that set it up perfectly for virality. But it wasn’t nearly as vicious or confrontational as people clearly wanted it to be, or as it has been portrayed in the many, many articles memorializing it as a prime example of Johnson’s zero-fakes-given approach to public life.
Similarly, watching Johnson’s “Madame Web” press appearances in full, I found them not quite as “chaotic” as the headlines and the video compilations wanted me to believe — nor even as critical of “Madame Web.” OK, so she found her blue-screen experience weird. She didn’t watch “Madame Web,” but she says she doesn’t watch most of her movies, a not-uncommon strategy among successful actors. She said her Gen Z castmates annoyed her; she also said she loved them. She mocked her career a bit on late-night TV. Is this really so strange?
It’s fun to imagine a star breaking protocol and going scorched-earth on her own bad movie. Plato thought only philosophers who had no interest in being king deserved the job, and we seem to feel something similar about famous people. We desperately crave celebrities who are unbeholden to celebrity culture, who are willing to commune with us about what sucks or who’s fake. We’re hungry enough for authenticity to risk making some up, treating the most minor breaches of the status quo as signs of some long-wished-for revolt. “I’m just not good at talking to journalists,” Johnson said in her “S.N.L.” monologue. “I think the big problem is that I say stuff, and then they write it down. And it’s really unfair.” The line got a hearty laugh. But then Johnson kept going. It’s unfair, she explained, because “most of the time I’m joking.” That got fewer laughs.
Source photograph for illustration above: Screenshot via Entertainment Tonight.
Peter C. Baker is a freelance writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes.”