Dakota Johnson Calls Verity's Sapphic Scenes 'On My Tombstone'

Dakota Johnson watched the script for Verity arrive, looked at the scenes with Anne Hathaway, and made a career announcement. "Spicy sapphic scenes! I love that! That'll be on my tombstone," she told Out Magazine. "It was very technical, but obviously incredibly enjoyable." The movie opens Thursday.

Verity arrives in theaters October 2 via Amazon Studios. The source material is Colleen Hoover's 2018 self-published psychological thriller, now sitting at No. 4 on Amazon's most-sold fiction chart after 111 weeks on the list. The timing is not a coincidence. The book's sales surge runs on pre-release heat, and the cast is generating that heat efficiently.

The setup is a love triangle built for maximum dread. Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, a successful author left paralyzed after a car accident. Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, the ghostwriter hired to complete Verity's unfinished book series. Josh Hartnett plays Jeremy Crawford, Verity's husband. Lowen moves into the Crawford house, discovers a disturbing unpublished autobiography, and the lines between fact and fiction start collapsing.

Hartnett, trending hard ahead of the opening, kept his read grounded. "We had such great chemistry as friends on set! The sexual scenes were a little bit goofy when we weren't filming." That is exactly what a co-star should say in press week.

What Hathaway said

Hathaway was not writing tombstone jokes. She was talking about community. "I would be nothing without the queer community," she said at a recent press event. "The fact that I'm receiving support from a community that is so dear to me means the world." The sapphic scenes were technical and enjoyable, per Johnson. The emotional temperature, per Hathaway, runs deeper than a promotional sound bite.

Colleen Hoover, who co-produced the adaptation, told Yahoo Entertainment the premise scared her more than any horror film: "Paranormal things don't scare me. Real-life situations, things that can actually happen to you, are what scares me." On whether the film changed her read of the story: "It did give me food for thought."

The actual marketing play

The Verity press tour is doing something interesting. The novel is built on unreliable narrators, on what people conceal versus reveal. Johnson's tombstone quote does exactly that: it reveals just enough to make you pay for the rest. "It was very technical, but obviously incredibly enjoyable" is not a spoiler. It is a tease. These are the mechanics of a book that built its 111-week run on word-of-mouth, and the cast is running the same engine in interview rooms.

Director Michael Showalter, working from a script by Nick Antosca, reportedly pushed the erotic content further than the novel. That decision lands in theaters on Thursday. The early internet verdict, based on the cast quotes alone, is already in.

Amazon Studios did not respond to a request for comment on the press tour reception.

Verity opens October 2. Colleen Hoover said the adaptation "gave her food for thought." Whether that thought matches yours depends entirely on whose autobiography you choose to believe.

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Sources & further reading

• Out Magazine: Dakota Johnson teases 'spicy sapphic scenes' with Anne Hathaway as 'incredibly enjoyable' (Ricky Cornish, Sept 25, 2026)
• Yahoo Entertainment: Best-Selling Author's 2018 Novel, With Star-Studded Movie, Is the Top Thriller on Amazon Right Now (DeAnna Janes, Sept 29, 2026)
• Wikimedia Commons: Anne Hathaway at 98th Oscars 02.png, photo by Margaret Gardiner (CC BY 3.0)