It can not be easy acting in a Fifty Shades Of Grey movie. The series has a way of neutralizing even its positive attributes. Fifty Shades Freed for example begins with a scene that should be catnip to actors playing well established characters.





 Christian Grey  Jamie Dornan is marrying Anastasia Steele Dakota Johnson after two movies of on and off whips and chains courtship and they exchange vows in a series of intimate close ups. Only after they kiss does the camera reveal that they are at a lavish well attended ceremony. Its rare that a movie jumps straight into a wedding scene and lets most of it play out on the actors faces without any cheesy audience reaction shots or contextual scene setting. But because this is a Fifty Shades movie Dornan and Johnson are still trapped, unable to make the scene their own. The vows are cheesy and the close ups are not especially evocative.


Though the Shades movies are popular it would be fair to question whether anyone is eagerly anticipating the next steps of these performers. Conventional wisdom dictates that the era of the movie star is over and that true stars are now beloved characters brands and other bits of intellectual property and Johnson and Dornan do not seem like exceptions to this rule. She has been the lead in one non Shades minor financial success How To Be Single and he has not appeared in many other movies at all let alone hits.


But for a film series like Fifty Shades of Grey or its antecedent Twilight it can never be stated often enough that the Shades books began their lives as actual Twilight fan fiction its hard to say that stars do not matter. Fans may go to these movies to see Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele which is to say moneyed and nudity prone variations on Edward Cullen and Bella Swan but once actors are cast in those roles they become yoked to it in a way that seems to matter more than who has wearing Batmans cowl or Spider Mans suit. Series like Fifty Shades and Twilight may lack a rudimentary understanding of what constitutes interesting human behavior or a story with any momentum but there so little sometimes experimentally little going on in these movies that they direct attention to their actors for virtually their entire running times.