Dakota Johnson talks 'Madame Web' and why her famous parents would make decent superheroes

Dakota Johnson is quick to admit that she never thought being in a superhero movie would be “part of my journey.” And yet here she is in “Madame Web,” saving the day with brains and heart rather than a magical hammer.

“Being a young woman whose superpower is her mind felt really important to me and something that I really wanted to work with,” says Johnson, 34, whose filmography includes the “Fifty Shades” trilogy and “The Social Network” as well as film-festival fare like “Cha Cha Real Smooth” and “The Lost Daughter.”

Johnson stars in “Madame Web” (in theaters now) as Cassandra Webb, a New York City paramedic who has psychic visions of the future after a near-death experience and finds herself needing to protect three girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) from a murderous mystery villain named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim).

Playing a heroic clairvoyant may not have been in the cards, but perhaps it was in the genetics? Johnson’s parents had their Hollywood heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s ? the Stone Age for comic book movies – but she thinks they would have gone for superhero gigs. Her dad, “Miami Vice” icon Don Johnson, "always really loved playing cops, obviously on TV,” she says, and inhabiting a character like Catwoman “would've been a cool thing” for mom Melanie Griffith.

“I’d say ‘Working Girl’ was a superhero myself,” adds “Web” director S.J. Clarkson. “It was for me growing up, anyway.”

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Since the movie is the beginning of Cassandra’s story, Johnson wanted to explore “a younger version” of the character from Marvel’s Spider-Man comic books, where she’s depicted as an elderly blind clairvoyant confined to a chair. Still, in the comics, Cassandra has a “biting” and dark sense of humor and is “very clever and whip-smart,” Johnson says. “That was important to me and S.J. to include.”

Clarkson, who directed episodes of the Marvel streaming shows “Jessica Jones” and “The Defenders,” was excited about Cassie as a woman who doesn't need superhuman strength to be a hero. “The power of our mind has infinite potential and I thought that was really interesting to explore what on first glance feels like quite a challenging superpower,” she says.

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The “Madame Web” director reports that Johnson is “proper funny,” and it was important to Clarkson that she include moments of levity in the otherwise serious psychological thriller. In one scene, Cassie tries to walk on walls like Ezekiel – since both get their abilities from a special spider – and she crumples to the ground in defeat. “It was a really wonderful time” for Clarkson, Johnson deadpans. “We did it quite a few times. That was silly.”

There was also a whole otherworldly bent to deal with: Johnson and Clarkson collaborated on the best way to show Cassie’s complex psychic visions, complete with weird spider webs and flashes of future events.

“Working on a blue screen, you really have to activate your imagination a lot,” Johnson says. She had “a really good time” making the movie, but “there were moments where I was just really lost and didn't know what we were doing. It was mostly me that was the idiot who was like, ‘I don't know what's happening.’ ”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Madame Web' star Dakota Johnson felt like an 'idiot' as a Marvel hero