THE RUNDOWN
- Dakota Johnson will be playing Marilyn Monroe in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film Flesh Impact.
- Vanity Fair shared the first photos of Johnson in character, along with Ellen Burstyn, who is playing an older version of Monroe.
- Gyllenhaal spoke about why she had Johnson in mind for the role even though the two stars don’t have a close physical resemblance.
When Maggie Gyllenhaal thought of casting a young Marilyn Monroe for her short film Flesh Impact, which will debut at the Venice Film Festival in honor of Monroe’s 100th birthday, she had an unexpected pick in mind: Dakota Johnson.
Gyllenhaal cast two actresses, Johnson and 93-year-old Ellen Burstyn, to play young and old versions of the starlet who died at age 36. Vanity Fair shared the first-look images of both women in the role:
Gyllenhaal explained how she decided on casting Johnson, saying she had been hesitant at first because Johnson doesn’t really look like Monroe.
“Then I thought, That’s ridiculous. Who cares?” she told Vanity Fair. “I don’t know that anyone even really totally knows what Marilyn looks like because she’s been so commodified and made into this myth and she’s very blurry in my mind.”
Gyllenhaal wrote the script for the 17-minute film. During that process, “Dakota was always on my mind. When I’m writing, sometimes I’ll find an actor just keeps coming up and I almost have to actively push them out of my head so that I don’t limit what I’m doing at all.”
The film explores “what would’ve happened if [Monroe] had 60 years to herself,” Gyllenhaal said. “What might be different about the work that she would do now?”
“This film is very much a mixture of Marilyn and my fantasy of her,” she continued. “In a lot of ways, this movie is about Marilyn and also about actresses in general and what it’s like to have that strange, very vulnerable, and, at the same time, very powerful job.”
The Venice Film Festival shared this log line for the project on its site: “A mysterious old woman auditions for a play at a small blackbox theater in New York City. As she describes her qualifications and her acting experience, secrets about her identity and the misconceptions about her life bubble to the surface.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.elle.com ’
