When the Beyond Ana & Christian podcast launched its first episode, no one expected both Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson to appear—and even fewer expected them to get brutally honest.
The reunion episode, now one of the most downloaded celebrity podcasts of 2025, offered more than nostalgic laughs. It gave fans the first real look at what happened behind the cameras—including the now-infamous “table read breakdown,” a moment Johnson described as “the worst day of filming I’ve ever had.”
“We had just gotten new script pages,” Dornan explained, “and suddenly Christian was saying things that felt… wrong. Creepy, even.” Johnson agreed: “I looked at Jamie and said, ‘This isn’t Christian. This is a villain.’” The scene was pulled, reworked, and never made it to the final cut.
They also revealed the emotional toll of carrying a franchise many in Hollywood mocked. “It was hard,” Dornan admitted. “We were the butt of every joke—but we worked harder than anyone thought.”
Surprisingly, they credited their friendship as the anchor that got them through. “We had a code word,” Johnson laughed. “Whenever one of us was overwhelmed, we’d say ‘cucumber’—and the other would find a way to get us out of there.”
Today, they remain close friends, with Dornan even suggesting they could co-produce a future project together. “We’ve already been through fire. Now we just want to make something that’s truly ours,” he said.
