The first image of Dakota Johnson as Marilyn Monroe presents the actor at the height of the screen legend’s fame, while Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new short film imagines the older woman Monroe never had the chance to become.
Vanity Fair revealed the image Monday, showing Johnson, 36, in a short blond wig with Monroe’s signature beauty mark. A second still features Ellen Burstyn, 93, as an invented later version of Monroe, adding an emotional counterpoint to a story usually frozen in youth, fame and tragedy.
Why resemblance was not the deciding factor
Gyllenhaal, 48, wrote and directed the 17-minute film, titled Flesh Impact. She said Johnson was her immediate choice for the lead after the two worked together on the 2021 drama The Lost Daughter.
The filmmaker initially worried that the Fifty Shades star did not look enough like Monroe. She then reconsidered the entire premise.
“Then I thought, That’s ridiculous. Who cares?” Gyllenhaal told Vanity Fair.
“I don’t know that anyone even really totally knows what Marilyn looks like because she’s been so commodified and made into this myth and she’s very blurry in my mind,” she added.
That approach shifts the focus away from producing a perfect visual copy. Instead, the film appears interested in the distance between Monroe as a person and the polished, endlessly reproduced image that came to define her.
What role does Ellen Burstyn play?
Burstyn portrays a version of Monroe who survived long enough to grow old, something the real actor was denied. According to Gyllenhaal, Burstyn immediately agreed to take part when approached.
“I think that this role met Ellen at a particular moment where what it was offering to talk about and to think about and to dream about are things that she was interested in thinking and dreaming and talking about,” Gyllenhaal said.
The official Venice Film Festival synopsis follows a mysterious older woman auditioning for a play at a small black box theater in New York City. As she describes her experience and qualifications, clues about her identity emerge, along with the misconceptions that have shaped public understanding of her life.
The premise gives Monroe something Hollywood biographies cannot: imagined time. It also lets Burstyn embody the authority and perspective that can come with age, rather than treating Monroe only as a beautiful figure headed toward an already familiar ending.
How does the film rethink Marilyn Monroe?
Gyllenhaal described the project as “very much a mixture of Marilyn and my fantasy of her.” She said it is also about performers more broadly and the contradictions built into their work.
“In a lot of ways, this movie is about Marilyn and also about actresses in general and what it’s like to have that strange, very vulnerable, and, at the same time, very powerful job,” she said.
The cast also includes Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, and The Pitt actor Sepideh Moafi.
Monroe died in August 1962 at age 36 from acute barbiturate poisoning. Her death was officially classified as a probable suicide. Her short life and heavily managed public image have continued to attract filmmakers, with Ana de Armas, Michelle Williams, Kelli Garner, Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino among the actors who have portrayed her.
Flesh Impact will premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival in September, during the year marking the 100th anniversary of Monroe’s birth. Rather than offering another straightforward impersonation, the film asks what audiences might see if the mythology were allowed to age alongside the woman at its center.
