Dakota Johnson is terrified of auditions

CEBU, Philippines – Dakota Johnson recently opened up to another magazine about her childhood, growing up in a famous family and even getting kicked out of school.

“I hated school,” the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson explains. “I traveled so much in my early years that I didn’t understand the process. I felt suffocated – not like I was some grandiose artist, I just felt like an alien.”

After getting kicked out of an all-girls Catholic school as a teenager, she eventually moved to another school in Santa Monica that was filled with kids in a “similar situation” as her. But that still didn’t change how she felt about the education system.

“I was with my family a lot and I had a very serious boyfriend,” the 25-year-old actress notes. “I was into a lot of music. I got in trouble for smoking pot. I was more interested in spray painting things and hanging out with my friends than I was in school.”

Essentially, she knew she was bound to do something creative and acting eventually became her goal.

She landed a few roles—most notably in “The Social Network” as Justin Timberlake’s one-night stand—before taking on Anastasia Steele in the much-talked about “Fifty Shades of Grey” adaptation. Now, she’s looking forward to upcoming roles in “A Bigger Splash” and “Black Mass.”

But despite landing gig after gig as of late and becoming a household name among the masses, Johnson admits that auditions still scare her to death.

“Sometimes I panic to the point where I don’t know what I’m thinking or doing,” she admits. “I have a full anxiety attack. I have them all the time anyway, but with auditioning, it’s bad. I’m so terrified of it. I have crippling self- doubt!”

However, she clarifies: “But the things I’m the most afraid of, I run towards.”

For example, her upcoming role as Penelope in “A Bigger Splash” didn’t get a great start. Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino wanted to meet and talk with her about the opportunity as she was traveling with friends in Europe.

“I was not in the mental space to have a business meeting. I was a little reluctant to go,” she recalls, revealing that she ended up at a table reading just a few days later and couldn’t get through it. “I had a panic attack at the table read, and said, ‘I’m so sorry for wasting your time, but I’m not capable of doing this.’ They said, ‘Go back to New York, sort yourself out, and come back and make this movie.’”

She landed the role—in which she plays a highly sexual teenage daughter of a rock star—and really fell in love with the character and her feminine qualities.

“I wanted to use my body and my body language to make her the darkest person she could be, as well as making her desirable. It’s such an interesting thing, when young women are hyper-aware of their sexuality,” Johnson says. “That’s something that struck home with me. I feel like those women really provoke other women, too. If I see young girls flaunting their bodies around, I’m annoyed if I don’t think they know what they’re doing. It was so much fun to create a character that makes people really uncomfortable.”

Speaking of uncomfortable, the actress also couldn’t help but use the opportunity to acknowledge her hilariously awkward spat with her mother at the 2015 Academy Awards.

“Oh my God, so embarrassing!” Johnson said. “All day it was building up to that moment and then it was just the wrong time for me to have a little spaz.”