Two New/Old Outtakes from TIME Photoshoot

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Via @shadesofdakota

New/Old Picture of Jamie from Magic FM's Studio (February 13, 2015)

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New On Set Interview with Jamie and Sam Taylor-Johnson: "Who is Christian Grey?"

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Sam Taylor-Johnson Won't Direct 'Fifty Shades Darker'

Deadline - Sam Taylor-Johnson has made official what many suspected. She will not return for the second installment of the film franchise adaptation of E.L. James’ bestseller Fifty Shades Of Grey book trilogy for Universal.

In an exclusive statement to Deadline, Taylor-Johnson said that “Directing Fifty Shades of Grey has been an intense and incredible journey for which I am hugely grateful. I have Universal to thank for that. I forged close and lasting relationships with the cast, producers and crew and most especially, with Dakota and Jamie. While I will not be returning to direct the sequels, I wish nothing but success to whosoever takes on the exciting challenges of films two and three.”

This means Universal will next to find a new filmmaker to take over, after the first installment of the E.L. James book trilogy has already grossed over a half a billion at the worldwide box office. There is no word on a replacement helmer for Part II of the erotic romance series. Jamie Dornan will be back into the fold as billionaire Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson will return as Anastasia Steele. Each is under option deals for the next films. 

New Pictures of Jamie with Elton John, Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson (March 25)

samtaylorjohnson: "Today with Jamie. #jamiedornan"



samtaylorjohnson: "Beautiful men @aarontaylorjohnson @jamiedornan @eltonjohn #saviors"

Sam Taylor-Johnson Talks About Jamie and Dakota

JANE CAMPION: When I met you, I was really struck by how beautiful you are. You have a curious strength and humanity, kindness, and vulnerability. I know you must be ambitious, but there's nothing of the male-directed machine about you. Clearly you have your opinions, but you're not at all aggressive in your manner. Is that how things work with you on the set with your collaborators, as a director? How do you get what you want?

SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON: With a movie like this, I had to build trust and make Dakota and Jamie feel secure that they'd never be violated or put in a position where I was going to take advantage. I had just a few weeks to build an enormous security blanket around the three of us. Whatever we did was a discussion and a place of love and safety. Not too far from what we were talking about, really.

JANE CAMPION: With Dakota, it's easy to understand, because women are so used to being objectified sexually, but for Jamie, was that a struggle for him at all?

TAYLOR-JOHNSON: I think Jamie was definitely a little shy. His wife, Millie, just had a baby about four days, I think, before we started shooting. To be in the head space of a new father, very protective of the world, and then to step into this role of powerful dominant—it took enormous courage for him to be able to do that and be naked and be sexual at a time when he was feeling very different. I think both of them struggled with the nudity and the sex. They were both fully aware that that was what they signed on for, but when it comes to that moment, both of them were terrified of where we were going to go. Everyone said, "What was the chemistry like? Was it powerful?" As you well know, when you're shooting an  incredibly erotic scene, you've got your gaffers and your grips and your lighting and your sound. [Campion laughs] It's hard to create that intimacy.

Read full interview HERE
via @Shades_Blog

New Interviews of Jamie, Dakota, Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L. James with Yahoo Movies

Yahoo Movies - Despite the well-documented arguments between Fifty Shades of Grey novelist E.L. James and director Sam Taylor-Johnson and any uncomfortable sex scenes between stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, not every moment on set was a trying one. As it turns out, there were plenty of good days. Not that everyone involved could agree on one, as you’ll see in the video above. 

Johnson’s pick for the best day on set saw her laughing and flipping upside down in a contained space all by herself. ”The glider day [was my favorite] because we shot that on a green screen,” she told Yahoo Movies. “It was the funniest thing in the world to me because it was just really goofy. We were just spinning around in slow circles and I was laughing.”

Her costar Dornan selected a scene where he and Johnson were separated by a long glass table, hashing out the particulars of their characters’ S&M agreement. “We had really good fun doing the negotiation scene,” he said. “I really loved the way they set that up, the style of it and the lighting and everything. … It was a really fun back and forth.”

For James, the best moment was seeing a key ride from her novel come to life. “I think the bestest bestest day was filming the helicopter sequence,” James recalled. “We used the helipad on top of Vancouver’s television station. Just going up and then seeing the friggin’ helicopter up there. I was just like, ‘Oh my God! There’s the helicopter.’”

Of course, that also marked a day she got exactly what she wanted. The writer, who also served as a producer on the film, told us she asked that Christian Grey’s apartment building, the Escala — which is a real luxury tower in Seattle — have a helipad on the roof, so one was digitally added to the skyline shots.

In addition to the hardware store scene, Taylor-Johnson loved a very telling day: the last one. ”When we’d finished, that was a great day where we could just go, ‘Ahhh,’” she said.

Something tells us that’s what the four of them will all be saying come Friday when their media blitz has calmed down. At least until it comes time to get ready for those sequels.

Yahoo Movies - Back in 2011, young Dornan told MTV that Disney’s animated Robin Hood from 1973 was his “favorite film of all time.” Needless to say, a children’s movie isn’t exactly what we’d expect from the steamy star of Fifty Shades of Grey, so we confronted him about it.

"I just had such a crush on Maid Marian, the fox," he confessed. "I thought she was so beautiful growing up."

"It’s great now that we have a baby," he said, referring to 15-month-old daughter, Dulcie. "We put that film on sometimes. Even though animation’s come on a little bit in terms of the quality and stuff since then, it just has such a charm to it and the characters are so great. It’s so clever to see those characters played by animals.”

New Interviews of Jamie, Dakota and Sam Taylor-Johnson with MTV UK

New Portraits from USA Today - New Interview with Jamie and Dakota

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USA Today - Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson seem to go together like peanut butter and gasoline.

Put them in front of a TV camera, and they're awkward. Uneasy. Stiff. Cautious. Guarded.

So do the two leads, who play dominant Christian Grey and submissive Anastasia Steele in the movie adaptation of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey (in theaters Friday, with select Thursday screenings), detest each other? The answer, from a variety of parties, is no.

"She's an easy person to get along with. She's sweet," says Dornan, who replaced Charlie Hunnam in the role just four weeks before shooting started. "We instantly had a thing. It's so important, given what we had ahead of us. If we hadn't liked each other, I wouldn't have been cast. I got cast because they thought it worked. Dakota and I get on so well. We're friends now."

That's a good thing, given that Dornan spanks, handcuffs and blindfolds Johnson and introduces her to the chamber of titillation (or horrors, depending on your take) known as the S&M "Red Room," the place where Christian feels most comfortable in his own skin.

For Johnson, who played the wide-eyed college grad wooed by Christian, the scene where Ana is tied to the bed proved the hardest to shoot.

"Your senses are taken away when you're blindfolded and tied up. It's a really interesting brain exercise." When the director calls "cut," she says, "you're still tied up and blindfolded and not in the most comfortable of positions. Having those experiences, I understand how they make sense to people in their private home. In a filming environment, it was difficult."

Which is why, the actress says, connecting with and trusting her co-star was more important than ordinarily is the case. She had read with a slew of Hollywood's top actors before Dornan met with her.

"It was weird because I'd gone through so many men at that point. He was very calm and funny. He was able to keep up with my joke-making and that meant a lot."

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USA Today - You'll be seeing plenty of Dakota Johnson.

At 25, the actress has disrobed to play one of the leads in the hotly anticipated romantic thriller Fifty Shades of Grey, opening Friday (with select screenings Thursday). And, yes, she says it's unsettling to put herself out there like that.

"Sometimes I feel very nervous about it," she says. "I don't feel ashamed of my body. I think more women should be less ashamed of their bodies. It's an empowering thing.

"Obviously, it's a scary thing that a lot of people in the world will see me completely naked. But it's not me. It's not like they're watching me in my room."

Instead, they're seeing her as Anastasia Steele, the virginal college student who gets all tied up with Christian Grey, a millionaire man-about-town with a penchant for S&M. The film has an R rating, and avoided the NC-17 kiss of death by steering clear of full-frontal nudity. Still, there are ample amounts of flesh on display. Jamie Dornan, the Christian to Johnson's Ana, is also nearly nude.

"The thing to take from that is 'almost,'" says Dornan, 32. "I'm not massively uncomfortable with it. There's quite a long shot of my (butt). I wasn’t hugely comfortable with it when I watched it. That's my bum. Still my bum. Wow. You hope the end result is sexy and sensual."

Certainly, that was the goal for director Sam Taylor-Johnson when she signed on to direct the first installment of E.L. James' blockbuster sexual trilogy.

"This was not going to be gratuitous or salacious. It was never my intention to exploit them or their bodies," she says. "That was the only way to garner their trust — to make things sensual, beautiful and erotic. You don't have to be explicit."

Taylor-Johnson isn't worried that the mind-boggling amounts of attention lavished on the film will suddenly go to her leads' heads and turn them into crazed egomaniacs.

"Jamie is unfazed. Fame will just wash over him. Dakota is the sweetest person — she just wants to play with the kids and hang out with the family. They're both very grounded people," she says.

Johnson says she wasn't really prepared for the berserk response to the film, including the fans waiting outside her hotel on a cold Saturday to get a glimpse of the stars. That's one reason she has a bodyguard for the media tour. But she's not complaining, nor is she freaked out by anything that wound up on screen.

"Going into this, the books were so massive that you have a sense of it. But there's no way to prepare for it. The only thing I want to try to do is handle everything with as much grace as possible and still maintain my life as much as I can," says the actress, who is dating musician Matthew Hitt.

Her Ana is tough, manipulative, sexy, naive and passionate. But she's never a victim.

"People bring up abuse against women. That's something Sam and I were really conscious about and it was really important to both of us. In no way — she's not abused," says Johnson. "Everything is consensual. I thought that her sense of quiet confidence was so special and attractive."

The infamous Red Room, Christian's locked-up den of pleasure (or pain), isn't unveiled until nearly the end of the movie. Thankfully, says Dornan, those scenes were filmed at the shoot's end, when the co-stars were totally at ease with ach other.

"It's a tough way to spend a day. She was naked and tied up," the Irish actor says. "But we'd built up a rapport with each other. We'd have a bit of a pep talk every morning. Can you imagine how many sexual innuendos happen on a set like that? It's hard not to find humor in it."

Shooting the movie's finale, in which he lets loose on Ana and feels her disgust and wrath, left Dornan emotionally drained.

"It was brutal. It's the moment he realizes, 'What the (expletive) is wrong with me?' It made me feel a bit like that as well. I wasn't welting her with a belt," Dornan clarifies. "I'm hitting a cushion for the most part. We've also got that to deal with, to keep up in the intensity and the emotion when you're hitting a cushion. I was really going for it. That was tough."

Johnson, the daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, grew up on movie sets. It's where she feels most like herself, she says. Yet she's not sure if her parents will see Fifty Shades, for obvious reasons. Maybe, she says, they can give it a try and walk out if they're weirded out by seeing their daughter whipped, spanked and blindfolded.

"It's one of those really epic fairy-tale love stories," she says. "And it's coupled with this topic that's really intriguing and kind of naughty."

She found Anastasia an attractive character. "She has such a sense of self-worth that she doesn't feel the need to go out and party and be with boys until she really finds someone who can spar with her on all levels."

Dornan was cast four weeks before shooting started in Vancouver. He and his pregnant wife Amelia Warner relocated to Canada, where she gave birth to daughter Dulcie three days before her husband morphed into cool, controlling Christian.

"It was a mad time. It was mental when I think about it," says Dornan.

It also meant he didn't have much time to sculpt his body into physical perfection. "We trained as much as I could. I keep myself in relatively decent shape anyway. I seem to have quite good metabolism. That's natural and I'm lucky for that," Dornan says. "He didn't need to be a beast or a monster. He just needed to be in good shape. He didn't need to be like Thor.

"They tried to get me to do five protein shakes a day. One of them, I had to set an alarm for in the middle of the night. My wife was like, 'You stink of chocolate all the time.' It was pretty grim. I haven't had a protein shake since."

Now, the film is out of their hands, although both are signed on for two more installments, should they happen. And Johnson is up for it, saying she found even the steamiest sex scenes complex and ambitious, but fulfilling.

"It was using my body as a vessel," she says. "It wasn't my body. Someone else is having to move it in the right way to tell a story.

"It was exhilarating. I'd go home really exhausted some days. But most of the time, it was creatively gratifying."

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USA Today - Fifty Shades of Grey will likely leave audiences all tied up when it opens on Friday.

Two people who won’t be in theaters, watching the erotic film on opening weekend: Jamie Dornan, who plays Christian Grey, and his wife, Amelia Warner. In the film, he ties up Dakota Johnson, whips her, spanks her, and seduces her in his red room. And he shows his posterior.

Little wonder that his better half has no plans to sit through the movie just yet.

"She doesn’t want to watch this. [But] She wants to support me and my work. I won’t be able to sit there myself.  I am not going to put any pressure on her either way. It’s her decision. She’s well aware that it’s pretend, but it’s probably not that comfortable to watch."

Thanks to KSF for UHQ portraits.

Sam Taylor-Johnson and 'Fifty Shades of Grey' Makeup Department Head Victoria Down Mention Jamie

THR - Finding Christian Grey proved more difficult with Charlie Hunnam dropping out after he was cast.

Sam Taylor-Johnson: It was devastating at the time. It was tough because I thought I had a true collaborator with Charlie. But I started to sense that he was getting nervous about the fact that there were three books. It suddenly proved a little difficult of a concept that 10 years of his life could be this character. I think that made him nervous. But I now can't imagine anyone else but Jamie playing it. We just went through a real bumpy ride to get there.

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Lucky Magazine - Did actor Jamie Dornan wear any makeup in the film?

Victoria Down: We wanted to keep Jamie Dornan’s look very natural and sexy, so we used very little makeup on him.

Via

New Interview with Jamie, Dakota and Sam Taylor-Johnson + New Scenes from 'Fifty Shades of Grey'

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Sam Taylor-Johnson Talks About Jamie and Dakota

USAToday - And in the lead-up to the film’s release, there’s been rumormongering aplenty that the two leads, Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, are not exactly BFFs — even though they have hot sex on screen.

So we asked director Sam Taylor-Johnson. She set us straight, saying to please avoid any comparisons to Twilight.

"They do get along. They’re sweet together. I don’t know whether everyone expected them to have a Kristen Stewart/Robert Pattinson thing. Jamie is married with a small baby. Dakota is in a relationship. It’s a movie. It was work. They get along fine."

Sam Taylor-Johnson Confirms That She Will Direct 'Fifty Shades Darker' and Mentions Jamie

Youtube

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson confirms reports about 'Fifty Shades of Grey' sequels and says that she will direct 'Fifty Shades Darker' but official announcement yet to come.

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Source | Youtube

Dakota and Sam Taylor-Johnson Talk About Jamie

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New Photoshoot with Jamie, Dakota and Sam Taylor-Johnson for TIME

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TIME - American photographer Malerie Marder is known for her deeply personal and intimate – if not erotic – work. So when TIME asked her to shoot the stars and the director of the upcoming film based on the global phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey, Marder had to face her first hurdle. “My work tends to revolve around an intimate moment or private moment,” she says. “For this shoot, there were many people involved — and at a certain moment, at least 20 people in the room — so I had to make it feel the opposite. It’s never so much about reality as [it is about] believability in the moment or a felt experience.”

Marder chose to portray the film’s director Sam Taylor-Johnson on a bed among white sheets because she “thought of her as a modern-day angel,” she says. “But the bed implies things not so angelic.”

As for actress Dakota Johnson, who portrays the studious Anastasia Steele, she offered Marder the shoot’s most unanticipated moment. “Dakota threw back her head, turning the image topsy turvy, uninhibited, less portrait-like and more of a surrender,” she says.

Sam Taylor-Johnson and Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey Talk About 'Fifty Shades' Sex Scenes and Mention Jamie

TIME - Nobody signs up for a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey without understanding that they’re going to have to do a few things that they wouldn’t normally do in public. But there’s a big difference between knowing that you’re going to have to strip down in front of a camera crew and actually doing it.

“I don’t know if you can ever truly prepare someone for the actual time when it comes around,” says the movie’s director Sam Taylor-Johnson, who has herself been naked in front of cameras on multiple occasions for her fine art photography. She decided to save the more intimate scenes between the movie’s two stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan until closer to the end of filming so they knew each other — and the crew — a little better.

“But when it came to the day, it was the sudden realization of, ‘Oh, this is the day we’ve been discussing,'” says Taylor-Johnson. “I think the most important thing really was the sense of trust. The trust of how [cinematographer] Seamus [McGarvey] and I were going to shoot it. And the trust of Dakota in Jamie that he would take care of her, and the trust of Jamie in Dakota that she would take care of him. And that between us, this would be something not graphic — not porn, but much more sensuous.”

Neither of the stars are shy, per se. Dornan was an underwear model; meanwhile, in two of Johnson’s prior movies, The Social Network and The Five Year Engagement, she has bedroom scenes with Justin Timberlake and Jason Segel, respectively.

“I’m not afraid of nudity. I think women are beautiful,” says Johnson. “But it’s not easy to take off your clothes in front of a ton of people. It doesn’t become easier, but everybody understands it. Nobody’s weird about it. At least, not on set.”

McGarvey says he occasionally shot the sex scenes using the same techniques wildlife photographers use to not spook animals: keep your distance. “It was on the end of a zoom and we’d let them move,” he says. “And with that tighter lens sometimes you can get a more impressionistic, abstract view of bodies.”

To reduce the number of times the actors had to try and simulate an intimate moment, McGarvey also shot with two cameras wherever possible. On particularly close work, he’d shoot it himself, or use a remote control device to give the actors some space. “The camera is being operated off of a device 20 feet away from where the camera is, just so the actors don’t have a hairy old operator breathing down their backs,” he says.

Another important requirement for successfully shooting intimate scenes? Keep your sense of humor. “I took a great picture: the two of them in bed together, everything going on, with this great big bearded guy standing next to them with a reflector,” says Taylor-Johnson. “It’s a very unsexy moment.”

Via

New Interview of Jamie + Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L. James Talk About Jamie

Casting director Francine Maisler and her team had been seeing actors in New York City, Los Angeles and London, where Jamie Dornan had put himself forward for the role of Christian Grey.

The Irish performer, known for his BAFTA Award-winning role on television’s The Fall and his work on Once Upon a Time, taped an audition scene.  For script security, those initially auditioning had been asked to prepare a scene from another film (Dornan chose a scene from True Romance); it was only later when winnowing applicants that anything approaching scripted materials was provided.  Of the series’ ubiquity, Dornan remarks: “I was totally aware of the books.  You’d have to be dead to not know of them.”

Following the promising taping, the actor Skyped with Taylor-Johnson and met with De Luca, James and Brunetti in London.  At Dornan’s request, the producers had a long sit-down with him.  “We thought that it was important that whoever was going to play these roles had to chase them, because they would be really putting themselves out there,” explains Brunetti.  “If there was going to be any apprehension at all, it was going to be a big problem in production and, perhaps, down the road in other films.”

Among the large ensemble of characters in her books, James knew that two characters had to be just perfect.  When asked what it was that drew her to Dornan as Christian Grey, she reflects: “You only have to see Jamie on screen to know the answer to that question. He has a real brooding intensity and presence. And he’s kind of easy on the eye, which helps.”

Dornan was up for the multitude of challenges and appreciated that Christian Grey is many things to many people.  He supplies: “From the outside, Christian is very intriguing and powerful, an impressive man with numerous businesses.  They’re all under one grand enterprise, but that incorporates all kinds of different telecommunications and farming technology companies. There are many different facets to his empire, and he’s incredibly young to be in this position. He’s all about power and money, and he has plenty of both. But as we delve deeper, we realize that there’s a lot more to him than that.”

After finding a welcome reception in England, Dornan flew to Los Angeles to audition in person for Taylor-Johnson, a meeting that would put him with the already-cast Dakota Johnson for a “chemistry read.”  For his part, the somewhat soft-spoken actor admits, “I liked Dakota instantly.  She has a sort of aloofness to her, and she was thorough and just very good.  I actually felt sorry for her when we auditioned.  She had to do these scenes over and over with different guys, and then I came in at the end of the day, sort of asking, ‘Look, can you muster up another good performance for me?’ And she did.”

Dornan boils it down to the task before him: “As an actor, you are looking for parts that will be challenging and different.  I’ve never played anyone like Christian before.  He’s a very intriguing character with a lot of layers, a lot of depth, and that’s what you want: to portray him in a truthful way on screen.”

Taylor-Johnson was quite moved to see the performers’ connection and knew she’d found the perfect Christian to her Ana.  (Johnson had originally been paired with Charlie Hunnam, but the actor departed the film prior to the start of principal photography).  The director says: “Jamie Dornan is a fantastic, perfectly pitched Christian Grey.  He brings a lot to this role—an elegance to the character, but he also brings exactly what Christian is, which is that slight one-step-removed mystery.  That’s because Jamie has that innately in him already.  He’s an extraordinary actor, and he plays Christian Grey exactly as he should be played.”

Source

New Picture of Jamie, Dakota and Sam Taylor-Johnson in Casopis TV Mini Magazine (Czech)

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Original Cover

LQ Scans

 

Source | Source | Source | Source Via

Sam Taylor-Johnson Talks About Jamie

The Independent - The casting process was subject to frenzied speculation and some incredibly wishful thinking by Ryan Gosling fans, but the film-makers always planned to pick two relative unknowns. Dakota Johnson – daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith – aced her audition with a monologue from Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 movie Persona. And after Taylor-Johnson had seen “hundreds of devastatingly handsome men”, the title role eventually went to British actor Charlie Hunnam.

Weeks later, however, Hunnam pulled out, saying the shoot would come too hot on the heels of his TV drama, Sons of Anarchy, for him to comfortably segue into Christian Grey. “50’s going to be massive,” he told US Weekly. “I really didn’t want to fail on such a grand scale.

For Taylor-Johnson, the news came as a blow. “Charlie and I were working really well together,” she says. “But signing up for one film is very different from signing up for a trilogy. As the process got bigger, I started to sense his fear. On the day he called me to say that he just couldn’t do it, I knew it was coming, but it was very sad. But then, I truly believe Jamie was meant to be Christian Grey – so, things work out for a reason.”

Casting Christian was not simply a case of finding a suitable actor, she adds, but someone “who could carry the weight of what would come next... Jamie has so much humour, and nothing seems to bother him or penetrate his psyche too deeply. He seems to take everything and roll with it – so to speak.” She chuckles, and then checks herself: “When you make a film like this, everything becomes a double entendre.”

Jamie and Dakota on the Cover of Glamour US Magazine (March 2015) - New Photoshoot + New Interview

Update: Added HQ digital scans and more quotes from the interview.

Update: Added UHQ scans.

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Printed Edition - UHQ 

          

Digital Scans - HQ/Tagged

Interview

Transcripted by us

I can show you how pleasurable pain can be.... There will be pain, but nothingyou can't handle.... Do you trust me, Ana? 

If you have to ask, that’s billionaire Christian Grey smooth-talking recent college grad Anastasia Steele in E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, the novel that sparked Fifty Shades Fever. Since 2011 the trilogy has sold more than 100 million copies and “Fifty Shades" references have been slapped onto everything from classical music albums to baby onesies (“All my mommy wanted was a night with Mr. Grey”); perhaps not coincidentally, the bedroom practices popularized by the book have gone mainstream too, with bondage clubs popping up at Ivy League schools and sales of Ana’s favorite sex toys skyrocketing. But like it or not —and lots of people don’t— the phenomenon is just getting started. On February 13 Fifty Shades of Grey the film is set to dominate theaters, and its two previously under-the-radar stars, Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, are about to find out how it feels to be bona fide sex symbols. 

You may recognize their faces: Johnson, the 25-year-old daughter of actors Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, made her film debut at only 10 in Crazy in Alabama, directed by her stepdad, Antonio Banderas. She went on to charm audiences with small roles in big pictures like The Social Network and 21 Jump Street, as well as the lead in the critically beloved TV show Ben and Kate. And Dornan, 32, is no stranger to being the Man Women Want. The Belfast, Northern Ireland, native spent 10 years modeling for Dior, Armani, and Calvin Klein, posing shirtless with Kate Moss and in his undies with Eva Mendes. But if you’re tempted to dismiss him as a model who’s “trying" to act, instead of an actor who modeled, his two seasons as a serial killer in the BBC series The Fall will cure you of that notion.

So are they ready? “I don’t think anyone can really prepare Jamie and Dakota for what’s going to happen when this film comes out," says Fifty Shades (female!) director, Sam Taylor- Johnson. Taylor-Johnson (no relation to Dakota) says she’s “very protective” of both her stars, but even she won’t be able to shield them from critics ready to pounce on the material. (Salman Rushdie once proclaimed that Fifty Shades the book “made Twilight look like War and Peace”) But the Fifty Shades cast and crew are more concerned with pleasing die-hard fans, who congregate on message boards and at book clubs, hotly debating every morsel of news on the film’s development, from the last-minute casting of Dornan as Christian (was he a good enough replacement, they debated, for Charlie Hunnam, who dropped out because of scheduling issues?) to Johnson’s hair in the trailer (is it as long as Ana’s should be? as dark? as bedhead-y?).

So much speculation! Glamour went in search ofthe real story of the making ofthe movie, and in this exclusive, Dornan, Johnson, and Taylor-Johnson took turns divulging the details of their Fifty Shades ride so far. Mr. Grey and Co. will see you now. 

On Chasing the Hottest Roles in Hollywood 

Dakota Johnson: I had read the books and was drawn to the character of Ana because she’s private, loving, honest—and because she and Christian are both incredibly intelligent, confident, and can spar with each other on every level. I auditioned for two months. I met with Sam abunch oftimes. So when I found out I had the part, I think I started crying. I was relieved the not-knowing was over. 

Sam Taylor-Johnson: Dakota was everything that I wanted in Anastasia. She has a strong sense of who she is, but at the same time there’s a sweetness about her. It was tough to find Christian because, on the page, he’s perfect. In real life there aren’t so many people that tick all those boxes: to be able to be charismatic and charming, successful, wealthy, and devastating handsome.

Jamie Dornan: At first, I didn’t audition. I made a tape in London with a casting director. I didn’t hear anything until they cast Charlie [Hunnam]. I thought it was kind of funny to say that I’d auditioned to play Christian and failed miserably. Then whatever happened with [Charlie] happened, and the doors opened again.