Dakota Johnson has fully embraced being a stepmom figure to her partner Chris Martin’s children.
“I love those kids like my life depends on it. With all my heart,” she said in a new interview with Bustle about the Coldplay frontman’s daughter Apple, 19, and son Moses, 17, from his first marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow.
For the “Madame Web” star, 34, people don’t need to be blood-related to be family.
“I grew up in a family that was so big, and I just believe in the saying ‘Blood is thicker than water,” she said, before explaining, “The actual saying is ‘The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,’ which means that the connections with people you choose are more solid than the connections to the people you’re actually born to.”
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Johnson said that a “chosen family” can be “equally as important, if not more.”
“I have four brothers and two sisters, and my two sisters are not blood-related to each other, but they are sisters and they call each other sisters and they are always together. And my two older brothers are not blood-related to each other. And they are brothers,” Johnson explained.
Johnson is the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. Griffith shares a son, Alexander, with ex-husband Steven Bauer and shares daughter Stella with ex-husband Antonio Banderas.
Don, meanwhile, shares son Jesse with ex Patti D’Arbanville, and three children, Grace, Jasper and Deacon with ex-wife Kelley Phleger.
“No matter how f–ked up it is, or who’s in rehab, or who’s not speaking to whom, or who’s divorcing whom, we’re family. And we are always going to be a family. It’s really real,” Dakota said.
While the “50 Shades of Grey” actress claimed to be unaware of the public interest surrounding her relationship with the Paltrow, she is happy social media users are supportive.
“That’s great. I’m glad there was that positive reaction,” she said, referring to when fans went crazy over a photo of the Goop founder and Dakota holding hands last year.
Dakota and Martin, 47, have been romantically linked since 2017 — a year after he and Paltrow finalized their divorce.
The exes were married for 11 years before announcing their “conscious uncoupling” in 2014.
Since their breakup, Martin and Paltrow have continued to amicably co-parent their children and along the way, Dakota has been extremely involved.
In 2019, the “How to be Single” actress joined her musician boyfriend, Paltrow and their kids for a family ski trip in Aspen, Colo.
Two years later, Dakota and the “Glee” alum were seen bonding at a Gucci fashion show in Los Angeles.
Paltrow has spoken openly about her close relationship with Dakota, admitting in an Instagram Q&A last January that she loves her “very much.”
Last October, Paltrow further detailed how she feels about her during another Instagram Q&A.
“We’re actually very good friends,” Paltrow said, adding that she’s “an adorable, wonderful person.”
Paltrow married Brad Falchuk in 2018 and subsequently became a stepmom to his two children from a previous marriage.
The “Iron Man” star admitted that raising her stepchildren was “really hard at first.”
“There’s no book on this. Nobody tells us what to do. And in fact, all of the existing media around what a stepmother is casts us in this evil, villainous light,” she said on social media earlier this year. “It’s kind of like trying to avoid landmines.”
