Last month, Lainey sent me a Twitter thread by ridiculing a specific type of celebrity profile – the daughter of a famous parent. Here’s just some of it:
Dakota Johnson’s new profile in Marie Claire has so many shades of this (one might say… 50 shades), from the gushing over her glamorous pedigree to the mentions of depth – she feels deeply! (As opposed to those shallow feelers.) On her work, we are told that, “Her heart, it seems, calls the shots.” “I really don’t have a method, and I don’t want one,” she says of picking projects. “It’s very intuitive and emotional.” Because worrying about money or the next job is not why she became an actress. She became an actress because of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Seriously.
She says about movies like Notting Hill, “When I was growing up, I loved those movies so much. They were the reason why I was like, Well, maybe I could be an actress. Maybe I could be a movie star.” Julia Roberts is a force of nature, but that’s what made Dakota think she could be a movie star? Not, like, her grandmother Tippi Hedren?
I’m just a girl, standing in front of my three famous parents, asking to be a movie star.
But fine! She took her time, landed on a big project without letting it overrun her life and now she has the freedom to do what she wants. (Yes, it can be argued she’s always had that freedom.)
With that, she’s chosen to direct Coldplay’s video for “Cry Cry Cry” alongside Cory Bailey. When Lainey texted me about it last night, I didn’t know Coldplay had a new video out. And it’s not even that new - it came out on Valentine’s Day, but it came up in the Marie Claire interview. (Dakota says, jokingly, her relationship with Chris Martin had nothing to do with her getting the job.)
About the video: it’s a love story set at a dancehall, with a couple traveling through different eras together into old age. The song has a doo-wop backdrop and it’s fine. I really liked the lead dancers but couldn’t find their names online.
Now that their star has dimmed, it’s easy to look back at Coldplay’s heyday and say the music was never your thing but there’s no denying that they were once massive. Chris Martin is still very famous, even if the albums don’t land like they used to -- I checked and it debuted on #7 on the Billboard Hot 100, which is actually a lot higher than I would have guessed. This isn’t a knock on them as it’s their eighth album and bands can’t stay hot and relevant forever. There’s no shame in being usurped by Imagine Dragons. (Lainey: and BTS.)
The interesting thing about Chris and Dakota working together is that they are private so there’s really no way to promote this without acknowledging the relationship and, in some ways, teasing some details about their life. Protecting their privacy for so long has led people away from being interested in them, which means the video came and went without a lot of attention (it has about 6.5 million views on YouTube; Gaga’s "Stupid Love" came out the same month and has over 77 million). “Cry Cry Cry” might have been a fun creative exercise but it didn’t move the needle for Coldplay or for Dakota. But when you are led by your heart, YouTube views and money and future projects don’t matter. Feeling deeply is its own currency.
