He Kept Her Company at a Party in 2014. She Forgot It Happened. He Remembered Everything. And Then He Advised Her to Wiggle Her Toes for Money.

The full, complete, completely unhinged story of PEDRO PASCAL and DAKOTA JOHNSON — from a Golden Globes after-party where she was left alone, to MATERIALISTS at Cannes, to the most unexpected career advice anyone has received from a co-star in the history of Hollywood.

In May 2025, at the Cannes Film Festival, PEDRO PASCAL interviewed his Materialists co-star DAKOTA JOHNSON for Elle UK. It was, by all accounts, a warm, funny, characteristically candid conversation between two people who had spent months filming a romantic drama together and emerged from the experience as genuine friends.

And then Dakota Johnson told the world that Pedro Pascal had advised her to start a subscription content account and charge viewers to watch her wiggle her toes.

Specifically: “Pedro Pascal told me that I should have an OnlyFans and that I could just like wiggle my toe and make money. Should I do that?”

This is the Pedro Pascal-Dakota Johnson story. It begins at a party in 2014. It ends with toe content. In between, there is a film, a press tour that went viral, a chemistry so obvious that half the internet decided they were in love, and the specific quality of friendship that only happens between two people who are equally strange and equally comfortable with being strange together.

“Pedro Pascal told me that I should have an OnlyFans and that I could just like wiggle my toe and make money. Should I do that?” — Dakota Johnson, Elle UK, May 2025. The question to which there is no good answer.

How it started — 2014, a Golden Globes party, and the woman who forgot

During the same Elle UK interview, PEDRO PASCAL told a story about meeting Dakota Johnson for the first time. It was the Golden Globes in 2014. Not the ceremony — the after section, when they usher everyone out of the main event and into the network parties that follow. An HBO party, in this case.

Pedro’s account: Dakota arrived at the party alone. She had been left without a companion for the evening. She knew Sarah Paulson — Pedro’s closest friend of over twenty years — and through that connection, she met Pedro. He described what happened next with characteristic warmth: “You knew Sarah and so met me, and you were on your own. They probably wouldn’t give you a plus-one. So, we banded together, and we looked after you.”

Dakota Johnson’s response, upon hearing this story for the first time: “That’s so crazy that I don’t remember meeting you there. It feels like something substantial happened to me that night and I’m blocking it out.”

He remembered everything. She remembered nothing. He kept her company at a party eleven years ago. She processed the entire evening so thoroughly that it appears to have been filed under “inaccessible.” And they both found this entirely hilarious.

This is, in miniature, the entire dynamic of their friendship. Pedro Pascal, the devoted one, who shows up and remembers and keeps track of the whole story. Dakota Johnson, the one who clearly felt something but has entirely blocked out the mechanism of feeling it. And the specific warmth of a friendship that began in those conditions — one person looking after another at a party they were both navigating alone.

The 2014 Golden Globes was the same year Pedro Pascal was filming Game of Thrones Season 4 as Oberyn Martell — the role that would change his career. He was there as a new addition to the most-watched show on television, but not yet famous in the way he would be six months later when the episode aired. Dakota Johnson was there promoting the early work that would lead, later that year, to her casting in Fifty Shades of Grey — the role that would make her a household name. Two actors, both on the verge of something, at an HBO party, banding together. Neither of them knowing yet what was coming for either of them.

Materialists — the film that turned a party memory into a friendship

The professional relationship that cemented the friendship happened eleven years after that forgotten party. Materialists — directed by Celine Song, the filmmaker behind Past Lives — is a romantic drama in which PEDRO PASCAL plays Harry, described as the perfect man on paper: wealthy, kind, emotionally available. And DAKOTA JOHNSON plays the woman he is pursuing — a woman who may or may not believe she deserves him, and whose ex-boyfriend, played by Chris Evans, shows up to complicate everything.

The film opened on June 13, 2025. Critics praised the performances. The press tour — particularly the joint interviews where Pedro and Dakota appeared side by side — went significantly more viral than most press tours for romantic dramas. They were easy together. They finished each other’s thoughts. They laughed at things that were only funny if you understood the reference, and the references were clearly things that had accumulated over months of filming.

The on-screen dynamic, where Pedro plays a man patiently, devotedly pursuing Dakota’s character — mirrored, in a way that was impossible not to notice, the off-screen dynamic of a man who remembered a party from 2014 that his co-star had completely forgotten about.

The OnlyFans advice — context, controversy, and why it is completely in character

When Dakota Johnson revealed that Pedro Pascal had advised her to start a subscription content account and charge people to watch her wiggle her toes, the internet had feelings. Some of those feelings were negative. A segment of social media, reading the story without context, characterized it as inappropriate. Others defended the joke immediately, pointing out that this is — obviously, clearly, unmistakably — the kind of thing that is said between two close friends who have established the specific vocabulary of a friendship in which this is funny and not anything else.

The context that was missing from most of the outrage: Dakota Johnson recounted this story while laughing. She then said “Should I do that?” — a question that implies she found the suggestion charming rather than offensive. She then spent the next three paragraphs attempting to understand what OnlyFans actually is, which produced the line “Are OnlyFans models hot? Are they different to regular models?” — a line that suggests her relationship with the concept of OnlyFans is one of pure anthropological curiosity rather than personal affront.

This is the friendship. Pedro Pascal, who gives unhinged advice with complete sincerity. Dakota Johnson, who receives it with confused delight and then tells journalists about it because it is genuinely the funniest thing that happened to her that week. Two people who are, individually, extremely strange in their own right — and who have found in each other someone who matches the specific frequency of their strangeness.

What their friendship is actually about — underneath the toe content

The surface of the Pedro-Dakota friendship is very funny. The OnlyFans advice. The Golden Globes party she forgot. The press tour interviews where they seemed to be operating on a private frequency that made everyone around them feel slightly excluded in the warmest possible way.

But the thing underneath it — the thing that makes it feel real rather than performed — is simpler. PEDRO PASCAL looked after a young woman who was alone at a party in 2014. He did not make a thing of it. He did not remember it as a significant act of kindness. He remembered it as the beginning of a friendship — as the moment when two people who both happened to be navigating a glamorous industry event without a companion found each other and decided to navigate it together instead.

She forgot. He remembered. And then, eleven years later, they made a film together about what it means to choose someone — or not choose someone — in a world full of people who seem perfect on paper and people who know your drink order and have loved you for years in a way that has never quite been named.

In Materialists, Pedro plays the man who is perfect on paper. In their actual friendship, he is the man who remembered the party and gave the toe content advice. Both versions of him are real. Both versions of him are, unmistakably, exactly who he is.

The film made $108 million at the box office. Dakota Johnson did not start an OnlyFans. And somewhere, Pedro Pascal is still absolutely certain that the wiggling toe strategy would have worked.

“Should I do that?” — Dakota Johnson, on the OnlyFans suggestion. The question the internet is still discussing. The answer Pedro Pascal is still completely confident about.