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It’s not uncommon for movie publicists to issue a set of demands before you interview a celebrity. Typically, it involves restrictions such as “no unapproved games” or “no questions about politics”, but the one thing they almost always say is, “no questions about relationships”.
While preparing to interview Dakota Johnson about her new movie, Splitsville, I worry about what I might do if this directive comes through. Not because I desperately need to know if the next Coldplay record will be about her (the actress was engaged to band frontman Chris Martin, but they split in June after eight years together), but if relationship chat is off the table altogether, I’m going to need a whole new set of questions.
You see, in her two most recent on-screen roles, Johnson has been actively and skilfully dissecting the mess of modern relationships.
Queen of the unromantic comedy: Dakota Johnson in Splitsville.
First, she played Lucy, an “eternal bachelorette” and professional matchmaker in Celine Song’s Materialists, who firmly believed that “dating takes a lot of effort, but love is easy”. Now, she’s appearing in Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville, a self-described “unromantic comedy” that casts Johnson as Julie, a woman who is navigating an open marriage with her husband, Paul (Covino), a situation that teaches her that love is complicated.
Thematically, Materialists and Splitsville share much in common; both are anti-romantic comedies that explore the constantly shifting landscape of how, why, and who we love. But at their core, they’re both movies about relationships. Thankfully, right before the interview, the publicist gets in touch with more specific parameters (“questions of a personal nature will not be permitted”), leaving me free to ask Johnson whether her fascination with the complexities of modern relationships is by accident or design.
“I don’t really have a mandate on what style of film I want to make at any point, I just crave soulful, honest and thought-provoking projects,” she explains via Zoom. “But Celine [Song] makes the point in Materialists that romance and relationships are wrongly categorised as ‘girl shit’ when really they’re universal subjects that make for interesting stories, and that’s what I want to be involved with telling.”
Materialists, starring Johnson, Chris Evans (left) and Pedro Pascal, is about a tale as old as time: the love triangle.
Depending on your tastes, you could argue that Johnson’s career has been built on the back of interesting stories. The daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, her breakthrough role came as Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, a series of hugely popular films based on the erotic novels of British author E. L. James.
Then came a string of more traditional, albeit quirky romantic comedies – Am I OK?, Cha Cha Real Smooth – and her very own spin as a Jane Austen heroine in 2022’s Persuasion.
Of course, no Hollywood CV is complete without a big-budget Marvel movie, but Johnson’s superhero turn didn’t quite go as planned. In 2024, she starred in Madame Web, a critical and commercial failure, best remembered for a single line of nonsensical dialogue featured in the trailer but removed from the film’s final cut. (“He was in the Amazon with my mum when she was researching spiders right before she died.”)
The film went viral for all the wrong reasons, but Johnson emerged relatively unscathed, her refreshing honesty about the lukewarm response to Madame Web bringing her in on the joke. The actress later told Bustle: “I probably will never do anything like it again because I don’t make sense in that world.”
In Splitsville, Adria Arjona and Kyle Marvin play a couple whose relationship takes a turn for the worse when they witness a fatal crash.Credit: AP
For what it’s worth, Johnson makes a lot more sense in the world of Splitsville, a world that looks and feels like the one we live in. Written by Kyle Marvin and Covino (who also directs), the tale of two couples begins with a bang, or more accurately, a car crash. The glimpse of mortality that follows prompts Ashley (Adria Arjona) to tell Carey (Marvin) that she’s been unfaithful and wants a divorce.
Desperate for advice, he hotfoots it to the elegant beachside home of his best friend Paul (Covino), who’s been happily married for many years to Julie (Johnson). The two explain they’ve preserved their relationship by becoming an open couple and being “more flexible with the physical”.
But when Julie and Carey fall into each other’s arms, the frailty of fluid relationships is exposed. The film never seeks to denigrate monogamy or non-monogamy, instead focusing on the human desire to have it all, positioning ethical non-monogamy as a contemporary solution to an age-old problem.
From left: Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin, Adria Arjona and Dakota Johnson in Splitsville.
“People have been struggling with how to deal with monogamy and how to find happiness in their relationships since the dawn of time,” says Marvin. “But the way in which we deal with it is changing, and so this idea of ethical non-monogamy is on the rise.”
Covino agrees, and adds: “I think about ethical non-monogamy all the time. If we’re being honest, we’re often attracted to people even when we’re in a relationship, and we both have friends in open relationships. When we started exploring it, we kept reading articles and think pieces, so it felt like we were tackling something that people want to talk about.”
Covino and Johnson with Simon Webster, who plays their son in Splitsville.
He’s not wrong. While monogamy isn’t at risk of being elbowed out of the mainstream, curiosity about less traditional relationships is on the rise. The advocacy group Relationships Australia reports that about 6 per cent of Australians have been in an open relationship. At the same time, research by Bumble found that 47 per cent of people currently dating in Australia believe ethical non-monogamy is the future.
Data from the US reflects a similar acceptance of alternative relationship structures, although skewed towards the young. Fifty-one per cent of adults under 30 told Pew Research in 2023, that open marriage was “acceptable”, and 20 per cent of all Americans report experimenting with some form of non-monogamy. That’s a lot of people open to being open.
Says Johnson: “Whenever there’s somebody who is in a non-monogamous relationship, people are always so curious about it, how it works, and does it work; we all need to think about it. It’s a fascinating subject and the film pays close attention to how non-monogamous relationships interact with love and friendship too.”
This is all familiar ground for Marvin and Covino, best friends who met in advertising (“Kyle cast me in a commercial, best decision he’s ever made,” jokes Covino), before turning their attention to writing and directing. Their first feature, The Climb, won the Jury Prize award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, before its wider release was disrupted by the pandemic.
The Climb shares plenty of DNA with Splitsville; the former is an indie bromance set across several years and follows characters played by Covino and Marvin as their friendship collapses when one man sleeps with the other’s fiancee. For two people who seem intimately close as collaborators and friends, why the fixation on falling out?
Filmmaking buddies Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin explore modern love in Splitsville.Credit: AP
“I don’t really think it was a conscious thing for The Climb and Splitsville to cover similar terrain,” says Marvin. “We spend so much f---ing time together that at a certain point, it’s more fun to talk about what happens if it all goes wrong.”
Says Covino: “I’ve had many creative partnerships before Kyle, and it’s rare to find a dynamic where you actually complement each other. I’m not always the easiest person to work with, and there are plenty of disagreements, but we’re very good at conflict resolution, so I feel lucky.”
It’s tempting to imagine that Covino and Marvin’s real-life conflict resolution might resemble the elaborate fight scene that takes place midway through Splitsville.
Having learnt that Carey slept with his wife, Paul declares that everything is “totally fine” before slapping his best friend. He immediately apologises before slapping Carey again, kicking off an eight-minute sequence that includes biting, kicking, a smashed fish tank, several rescued goldfish and a blowtorch to the face before coming to a spectacular climax: two grown men crashing through a huge upstairs window and landing in the pool.
A captivating set piece, the fight scene was one of Covino and Marvin’s earliest ideas and key to setting the tone for Splitsville. “That was one of the scenes that unlocked the movie and what we were going to do with it,” Covino says. “Paul is trying to convince himself that everything’s fine; he’s an emotionally mature guy, right? But deep down there’s a whole different thing going on and he has this guttural, physical reaction to the jealousy, insecurity and emotion.”
Determined to perform the stunts themselves, the pair spent five weeks rehearsing with stunt coordinator Tyler Hall (from the Transformers franchise), perfecting the art of awkward violence.
“We took it very seriously. I understand what Tom Cruise goes through now,” says Marvin, laughing. “The tricky part was to make it feel realistic while also reminding the audience this is a comedy and these guys are still friends.”
Despite all the visual chaos that unfolds on screen during the fight, the best moment comes courtesy of Johnson’s Julie.
Walking into the wasteland that was once her house, Julie surveys the scene, scowls at the men, then delivers five simple words: “Are you f---ing kidding me?”
Few actors do deadpan better than Johnson, a fact not lost on her co-stars. “She’s very stoic in the film and always subtle in her comedy,” says Covino. “As a director, I never once had to say, ‘Dakota, throw it away, you’re trying to make the joke land too much’, she naturally understands that less is more. So she fit right into our sandbox.”
Johnson between takes on the set of Splitsville.
Johnson agrees: “It always takes a minute to figure out how to gel with people, and they [Kyle and Michael] work so well together, so you have to be malleable and be able to just sort of fit into it, but we were all very collaborative.”
The film also includes brief but noteworthy performances from O-T Fagbenle (Mr June Osborne in The Handmaid’s Tale) and Nicholas Braun of Succession fame, along with a series of well-aimed sight gags that run the gamut from singed eyebrows to a rich man’s choice of sneaker.
In addition to starring in the film, Johnson’s production company, TeaTime, also produced Splitsville. Johnson created TeaTime in 2019 alongside producing partner Ro Donnelly, and this month they signed a first-look deal with Sony Pictures Television. Under the agreement, they will develop and produce scripted content for the studio.
The move gives Johnson more creative control over her career, but having established herself as the poster girl for unromantic comedies, she’s not ruling out a return to the genre. “I get drawn to different things at different times, but making Splitsville and taking it to Cannes was really special,” she says. “So who knows what might happen next.”
If non-monogamy has taught her anything, it’s that it’s important to keep your options open.
Splitsville is in cinemas from September 11.
Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.
