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More than six decades after Marilyn Monroe’s death at just 36, filmmakers are still captivated by the woman behind one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons. The latest to revisit her legacy is Maggie Gyllenhaal with her new project Flesh Impact, a short film imagining the life Monroe might have lived had her life panned out differently.
Premiering at this year’s Venice Film Festival as part of celebrations marking what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday, the 17-minute film stars Dakota Johnson as a younger Monroe and Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn as an older version of the Some Like It Hot actress. First-look images (see here), shared by Vanity Fair, offer a glimpse of both actors in character—blonde wig and all.
Invited to make a film inspired by Monroe, Gyllenhaal wasn’t immediately convinced she was the right person for the job, as the caption notes.
“When Maggie Gyllenhaal was asked if she could write and direct a short film inspired by Marilyn Monroe, she wasn’t quite sure it was the right fit. ‘I thought, “I don’t know if I’m the woman for this job. Let me just take a minute and see what comes up.”‘”
As she immersed herself in Monroe’s work, Gyllenhaal became less interested in retelling the actor’s life than imagining the one she never got to live.
“I find her acting so fascinating, weird and wild and very joyful, mixed with terribly upsetting all at once,” she told Vanity Fair. “I kind of wondered what would’ve happened if she’d had 60 years to herself. What might be different about the work that she would do now?”
That idea became the foundation of Flesh Impact, which follows two versions of Monroe and, according to the Venice Film Festival, centres on “a mysterious old woman who auditions for a play at a small blackbox theatre in New York City. As she describes her qualifications and her acting experience, secrets about her identity and the misconceptions about her life bubble to the surface.”
For Gyllenhaal, Monroe also became a lens through which to explore the unique pressures and experience of being an actress.
“This film is very much a mixture of Marilyn and my fantasy of her,” she said. “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.”
Although Gyllenhaal noted that Johnson doesn’t bear an obvious resemblance to Monroe, she ultimately decided that wasn’t important.
“I thought, That’s ridiculous. Who cares?” she 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.”
Though she’s become known for her long, brown hair and bangs over the years, it won’t be the first time Johnson—who happens to be a natural blonde—has gone for a platinum transformation. For the 2023 film Daddio, she also leaned on wigs for lighter tresses.
Gyllenhaal also revealed that Johnson had been in her thoughts throughout the writing process. “Dakota was always on my mind. When I’m writing, sometimes I’ll find an actor just keeps coming up.”
Rather than offering another conventional Monroe biopic, Flesh Impact promises something more reflective, using one of Hollywood’s most enduring figures to explore fame, identity and the lives actresses are able to build for themselves.
