Melanie Griffith on Her Daughter’s Sexy Starring Role in Fifty Shades of Grey

It took over a year for Fifty Shades of Grey filmmakers to select the perfect lead actress to play Anastasia Steele, the college undergrad at the helm of E.L. James’s erotic bestseller. And when they did, they chose a third-generation starlet,Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson; granddaughter of Hitchcock muse, Tippi Hedren,; and this month’s V.F. Vanities star. When we bumped into Griffith at Wednesday night’s Vanity Fair party for Annie Leibovitz’s self-titled Taschen photography book, she told us about her experience thus far being the mother of the anticipated adaptation’s star.

“Of course I’ve read it!,” Griffith told us when we asked whether she’s read the bodice-ripping novel, described in reviews as “mommy porn.” “Every grown woman over 40 has read it!” And while she is endlessly proud of her daughter, and ripped through the pages of the film’s source material, she revealed that she will not be queuing up on premiere night to see her daughter get intimate with co-star Jamie Dornan. “No, it’s her movie, you know what I mean?” she told us. “It’d be weird if mom and dad were there and [Griffith’s husband] Antonio [Banderas] and all of the family. It would just be awkward. But I’m sure it will be great. I really love Sam [Taylor-Johnson], the director. And Dakota has a really good head on her shoulders. She’s no dummy.”

If she’s anything like her mother, she will not have to strain too hard for sex appeal. At the event, Griffith recalled her racier photo shoots with Leibovitz, one of which involved her wearing “a crazy platinum blonde wig with my tits at the forefront of the picture.” For another, Griffith said, the iconic photographer “wrapped me up in celluloid, otherwise naked. Sitting like a pin-up girl with just the celluloid.” The photo is so risqué that for years, Griffith said she hid it from her children, eventually deciding to hang it in the “men’s bathroom in our house” once she considered the kids sufficiently grown.

When we asked whether Johnson has asked her mother for any advice about her 50 Shades of Grey role, Griffith laughed, “Not so much. She looks at me and says, ‘I’m not going to do that, what you did, mom.’”