Dakota Johnson Is Playing Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Gyllenhaal Explains Why

Maggie Gyllenhaal needed a young Marilyn Monroe for Flesh Impact, a short film premiering at the Venice Film Festival to mark what would have been Monroe's 100th birthday. The name she kept arriving at was Dakota Johnson.

Vanity Fair has published the first images, showing Johnson alongside Ellen Burstyn, who is 93 and plays the older version of a woman who died at 36.

The casting objection, and the answer to it

Gyllenhaal admits she hesitated, for the obvious reason: Johnson does not especially resemble Monroe. Then she decided the objection was beside the point.

Her reasoning, given to Vanity Fair, is that nobody quite knows what Monroe looks like any more. The face has been commodified into myth to the point of blurring, so casting for resemblance is chasing something that no longer exists.

The choice was arguably made before the deliberation. Writing the 17 minute script, Gyllenhaal says Johnson kept surfacing in her mind, to the point where she had to actively push the actress out of her head to avoid narrowing what she was writing.

The premise

The film asks what would have happened if Monroe had been given sixty more years, and what the work she made in them might have looked like.

Venice puts it more obliquely in its own listing. An unnamed older woman turns up to try out for a production in a tiny New York black box theatre, and the account she gives of her credentials starts to give away who she actually is, along with everything the public has got wrong about her.

What it is really about

Gyllenhaal is candid that this is not biography. The film, she says, is a mixture of Marilyn and her own fantasy of Marilyn.

It is also about actresses more generally, and about what it is to hold a job that is strange, extremely vulnerable and extremely powerful at the same time. Casting a working actress rather than a lookalike starts to seem less like a compromise and more like the argument.