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Interview taken from IMAGINE Magazine. Order the latest issue here.
Dior wears MAISON DE HOE top, THE ARCHIVE X YANA earrings
There are interviews, and then there are conversations that feel like you’ve been dropped into the backseat with two best friends who happen to be among Hollywood’s most exciting young actors. When Dior Goodjohn sat down with Dafne Keen, the result was a candid look into the lives of two artists who know each other as well as they know their craft. The joyfully chaotic exchange between friends covered the physicality of performance all the way to the complexities of growing up on screen. The pair move seamlessly between laughter and vulnerability, showing testament to a friendship built on deep admiration and shared experience. This is Dior Goodjohn in her own words – layered, luminous, and ready for the world to meet her as more than a character on screen.
Dafne Keen: Well well well interviewing. This is crazy, hey girlie. I love that you’re all just in your car right now.
Dior Goodjohn: I have a fitting right after this. I’m doing the fitting after this.
DK: You’re sending me the pictures, right?
DG: Absolutely, I’m sending you the pictures.
DK: I can’t wait to see it. Let’s talk about the acting process. So I was re-watching recently because I was re-watching season one, prepping for Percy [Jackson and the Olympians], and I didn’t realise the first time around how physical your part was. I know that you’re a dancer and I know that you’re a very physical person. I mean, we’ve done a little gym sessions together. I was wondering, because I’m a very physical actor, and I think a lot of me prepping for characters is a lot of finding them through my body. I just wanted to know how you find in meshing your dance background and the physicality of building a character and how you build around that, or if you don’t, I don’t know.
DG: So it’s definitely a very, very big part in finding the character, especially when it comes to characters like Clarisse, where they are so physically demanding. The dance aspect comes in at a basic barrier for entry in the sense that fight choreo is legitimately that. It is choreo. So it’s the photographic memory from dancing helps with that so much. I’ve been a dancer since I was, like, two. So the type of confidence that you get, and I’m sure you know this. I feel like you dance, too. The type of confidence that you get from dance and the way that in which you know and understand your own body, it’s just so beyond because of that. Understanding my own body so well allows me to change up little bits and pieces within my muscle fibers to make myself. I was like, dude, just take a dance class. Just take a really basic freestyle dance class, just so that you know what it feels like to move and breathe in your body. So there’s that part of just when you know your own body so well, it’s easy to sew in different pieces of DNA to allow yourself to feel a switch when you turn into your character. And then there’s also too, just the aspect of just memorising her within my somatic system that in turn translates into my physical body and all of that in a bag of chips.
DK: Did you start acting or dancing first?
DG: All of it started kind of at the same time to be real. I think what it was I did everything very, very early. I was born early, started talking early, started making decisions early, everything early.
DK: No time to be wasted.
DG: I came to this earth with a mission.
DK: She came guns blazing.
DG: Exactly. See, you get it because you’re literally me with the exact same person. I think what it was really, it was music first. It was music and dancing first because the first three, this is what it was. The first three DVDs I had were, it was four. The first four DVDs I had were The Princess and the Frog, High School Musical 2, and then the Michael Jackson: This Is It documentary, and then the Beyonce live concert DVD. I would wear these out on my Disney princess box television when I was living with my dad in downtown LA, it was crazy. But I remember what it was. My mom tells me stories that I would always, like, at Toys R Us, bypass all of the dolls and kiddie stuff and go straight for the microphones and things like this. So what I was blessed with was knowing what I wanted to do before I even had thoughts or words to explain to people what I wanted to do. And my parents having the discernment to listen and accept it and put me into it so young. I don’t know what came first because for as long as I can remember, it was always just happening.
DK: That’s so interesting. I think I had a very similar experience, so I understand that. Because you do so many things, because you’re such an artist, you’re not just an actor, because I think there’s a lot of actors who aren’t artists, they’re just performers. But I think you are truly. You’re a musician, you’re a dancer, you’re an actor, you write, you kind of do everything. So what are your favorite parts of the creative process when you’re not acting? What’s your favorite part of being behind the camera, or about being in tune with your creativity and other aspects?
DG: The world building of it all is my favorite, like literally my absolute favorite part. And that stems across like every single artistic avenue and channel that I’m in. When it comes to acting, figuring out and literally developing the memories and how things felt and smelled and blah, blah, blah as my character is the most fun thing. Also too, it challenges my intellect of this. You infer what happened in your character’s life based on what the script says. And then you meet up with your acting coach or your mentor and you guys get to talking about it and going back and forth and playing tennis with it. And it just makes you think in a way that just cradles my brain so well. And then the same thing when it comes to the world building for the music, I remember when I first started putting stuff out, I was with people that didn’t really understand just creatively, we were not a match. Ok people, just creatively weren’t a match. I remember I had to go on a search to find the people that I felt understood and got what I was trying to say when I didn’t have the words to say it. Then once that happened, the diving into the history of my own culture, I spent all this time learning about Persian history and Creole roots and myths and stories, and really just immersing myself in my own culture so that I can create and develop this sonic and visual world for the music and I feel like nobody talks about how much world building goes into every single creative avenue from acting to music to fashion to writing to fucking architecture. It’s just the world building of it all I think is the most fun for me. There’s so many parts I love but the creation of it all is the most fun.
DK: I think that’s just because you’re a true creative. Getting to know you is so magical because the way you view the world is through a creative lens. You’re always creating associations and making links in your brain and that’s something I’m really grateful in our friendship for. Something I really appreciate about you is you are such a wise soul and you are so profound. When I was thinking of what to ask you, I think we have both had the experience of being a child actor. I really wanted to know from your point of view, what is something that you wish more people understood about being a young actor in Hollywood and about what that experience was like for you growing up in front of the camera and in the industry?
DG: That is such a loaded question – I don’t even know where to start.
DK: Do I trauma dump right now?
DG: I think, and I feel if you are wise as a person, you can infer this, but really that being a child actor is not something that’s for the faint of heart. There are people that are put in positions where they reach a certain level of success because they are just innately gifted, even though it’s not what they want to be doing. But that nine times out of 10, child actors become successful because they have an understanding of what they want from a very young age and begin to work hard, similar to that of an adult at an age where they should just be running around and playing and eating ice cream that has freaking bubble gum in it. Yes, child actors are mature but I wish people would have more grace for us if that makes any sense. Just understanding and allowing that. It is true: we are artsy, complex people that do need to be handled with care, and that we don’t know everything. As wise as we are, we don’t know every single thing.
DK: No, because a lot of it is life experience. And as wise as you are, for example, as a 12 year old, you’re never going to have the life experience a 50 year old has. It’s confusing because you’re expected to have that experience and you just don’t. How do you think your approach to acting has changed as you’ve grown up?
DG: I think just with time and with age, the deeper and more complex and profound the process is. It’s like the way wine ages with each year, a new flavor and a new aspect of the body of it appears. It’s the same thing with the process. I feel the more I discover myself and the more I learn new things about myself, the more I can incorporate those things that I’ve learned into my creative process. From the beginning, it’s exactly like how you said. When it started, you always have that artist dormant inside of you, but when you start, at least for me, it was very much from a performance aspect, all I wanted to do was perform. Tell me to create something and I could feel it coursing through my veins. I just didn’t know how to get it out. It was always difficult for me, but then give me something to replicate or embody, and then I’ll do it for you in a heartbeat. It transformed exactly like how you said from being a performer to being a creator and a real artist in that respect.
Dior wears HELENE GALWAS top, ABUSH necklace LEVI’S jeans
DK: I think what is so special about you again – I just keep gushing about you – but what’s so special about you and something that I observe in all of the artists that I really admire is; the driving motor behind your creativity is curiosity. Not putting yourself down because you’re not putting yourself down, but being like, I started as just a performer. You didn’t because you already had that curiosity and that hunger for understanding the world around you, and that curiosity for empathy which is where acting stems from. Acting is empathy. It is imagining what being in that set of circumstances would feel like. I think you were already an artist because you’re already wanting to understand the world around you and wanting to understand stories and wanting to make sense of what life is in a way.
DG: You are right, my girl. Literally, I love this. This is just like my therapy session and it’s going to be in a magazine. This is so lovely.
DK: This is so child actor corel. I love therapy. It’s in a magazine.
DG: Our therapy session is on display. Look at us.
DK: It’s on display. It’s insane work. I love it though. I wouldn’t want to do public therapy with anyone else. You’re so smiley. I love you.
DG: This is so crazy. Like, you’re interviewing me right now, this is insane.
DK: It’s so exciting. Honestly, it’s the career opportunity of a lifetime. As a woman and as a Hispanic woman, I feel a big responsibility in the characters I choose. I was wondering how you choose and if you feel that same level of responsibility as a young woman of colour choosing what kind of people you portray and what kind of characters young girls of colour will see you portraying, and how you discern, and what decisions go into the decision making?
DG: I love that you asked me that question because I recently had a tape for a character who was very mature, out of my spec. It was the chance to play a stereotypical black woman and the interesting thing about her to me was that she was a Berkeley graduate and a producer of this radio show who would find herself in a tough position, having to dance to make ends meet. It was a very difficult thing to decide whether to take the role. Although she had so many layers to her and so much depth and there was more to her than that met the eye and there was a conversation that had to be had between me and my team. Is this the type of archetype that I want to perpetuate in the world? I think as I get older and as more things come across my desk that I have to think about, it is very important to me that I do myself as well as all the little girls that look up to me, justice. Another thing that I tend to think about a lot is: because of how racially ambiguous I am, how many different people are going to be looking up to me? I absolutely do understand where you feel the responsibility to take roles that would make your people and the people who resonate with you feel empowered and respected, and make them feel that they could do whatever they wanted to do. It has been a thing in my mind as I get older, you are no longer asking to be portraying just the fun, bubbly friend, or the mean girl. It was always the fun bubbly friend or the mean girl, and now it is starting to get a bit more complex as I grow up.
DK: I think our industry is particularly dominated by straight white men that you are constantly handed these stereotypes of what box they have decided to put you in. It is so interesting the jobs we receive as women, and especially for you, as a woman of colour. What I have seen through my actress friends who have experienced it, it is always so interesting. Unfortunately, our moral responsibility to only portray things we think will be positive for…
DG: For the culture.
DK: The collective ones.
Dior wears CALEB PARIS jacket, LEVI’S jeans
DG: That is another thing to think about. Let’s say you do continue to be handed these opportunities to play a very specific, boxed in stereotype of a woman. I think if you can’t take the moral high ground or you are not in a position to take the moral high ground being like, you know what, I’m going to pass on this, I think the best thing that you can do, even sometimes more than just passing on something is going, I’m going to take this and I’m going to alchemise it and turn it into something that is beneficial to the people. Bring out characters and co-create with them, giving them something that they did not know that they wanted yet. Turn this into a positive thing. Really thinking about it, that’s the best thing that I can do and any female actress can do moving forward.
DK: 100% agree. What is so important as women is to portray this sort of spectrum of what womanhood is. We have been told it is this very small sliver of a thing when it really isn’t. Your performance in Percy is so beautiful. What’s so special about Clarisse’s character is her relationship to her father. A lot of people can relate to that in that way. You’ve played it in a way that was so subtle and complex. You can see it through the violence that she has in her and the aggression and this rage, which is actually all a mask for the pain in her. I think so many women experience that with their fathers specifically. I was wondering, first of all, how you found finding that bond, and also if you expected that specific relationship with Clarisse to her father to resonate so much with people, because it really resonated with a lot of young girls. I remember when it was coming out, a lot of people were talking about how much that storyline touched them because of everyone’s experiences with their own families.
DG: I knew that it was going to hit hard because it hit hard for me, way more than I thought it would going through that entire deconstructing process of her brain and picking it apart with Andrew. It was the scariest and most intense and also therapeutic experience figuring her out and not just seeing it all on paper, but to then absorb it and be okay with it and deal with it and move through it and find resolve at the end of it. Her story, not to a T, but in so many scary, similar parallels is just so attached to my life story as it is, I’m sure for so many kids out there. I knew it was going to hit hard because of how hard it hit for me. It was very, very intense playing her. When it comes to developing that relationship and finding that backstory, with her father: it was the most therapeutic and self-actualising thing that I’ve done in a really long time because it forced me to face the things that I hadn’t wanted to deal with in my own life. Not only from things that had happened to me in the past, but also to what I was currently going through in my life. Clarisse and I were both having to discover what it meant to say no and not feel guilty about saying no, and learn what it means to trust your instincts and know that just because it’s your decision does not automatically mean that it’s bad. Nine times out of ten it means that you are on the right path. That was a big theme for her in this season, and it was a big theme in my life as I was shooting the show – it was just very intense, and a lot. But I am really really glad that this kind of representation exists right now for young kids. Whenever you see tropes like this, when it comes to talking about real issues that young people face that shapes them into the adults that they are, it’s never in young adult programming. It is always after the fact of everything happening to you in your life. You never get to see or understand that other people really are going through it, so much so to the point where it’s a storyline in entertainment that you watch. Not only that, you also never really get to see a happy ending come out of it.There is something about when you grow up, it always is like, I want to make real art. It’s not going to have a happy ending. We get to see her where she starts, which is a shell and closed off. And then we get to see all of the reasons why she is the way she is. We get to see her be vulnerable and turn into this meek little shell of the girl that we know when she sees her dad, and then we see her basically get humiliated by her father in front of the people that are supposed to be taking authority from her. We watch her face and completely humiliate herself after her father humiliates her in trying to act like him and do exactly as daddy does because that’s what I was supposed to do, and this is what’s going to make him love me, and it not work. Then we see her have to make the decision to make the shift of like, ‘am I going to sit here and hate myself for not being just like my dad and never being able to live up to a standard’? Or am I going to say, ‘excuse me, whatever. I’m just going to do what I want because I have nothing left to lose, and maybe this will be the right thing for once’. We get to see her go through that and learn what that feels like, and be okay with loving people so unapologetically and making promises that she really believes she’s going to be able to keep, and learn what it means to be a woman and a leader at the exact same time. To really lead like a woman, not to lead like a man, and discover what it means to accept help and have that be okay and not totally a scary thing. Have her come out of this entire absolute insane karmic cycle a better person at the end of it, not back in the same position that she was. All I know is if I had seen that when I was nine, it would have changed the way that I thought about myself and my life, and what I could do growing up.
Dior wears LALO coat, SONS OF GEMINI top, GIANFRANCO FERRE necklace
DK: Definitely. It’s such an important message for young people to see. I’m so excited for everyone to see you. It’s so fucking good. Sorry, I have the worst party mouth, but your work is so beautiful. I’m so excited for the world to experience your joy. What projects are you most excited for to come out, because you have a lot on the horizon? You’re doing it all girl, and I would love to know what you’re most excited for the world to get to know about you through your art?
DG: I think in terms of what I’m excited for and what’s on the horizon, really just everything. What is so scary and what is cool about growing up in a lens is that everyone is watching you and everyone’s watching you grow up. Yes, it can be a scary thing, but also at the same time, it’s amazing. It’s so beautiful because all of my markers of growth are documented and in history – they will be there. I think the coolest part about all of this for me is that when I’m like 25 or 26, I’ll be able to look back, as well as the people that have been gracious enough to care about me and follow my career, to the beginning and see how much growth I’ve made. So it’s just everything. I cannot wait for everything and for people to see everything. When it comes to what I’m excited for people to discover about me through my art, it is the layers. That’s the thing that I’m most excited about because I have found that it really, and you never really fully get there all the way, but no one knows who you are for real. Everything on social media, as much as you try to be as authentic as possible and not censor yourself as much as you can, only so much of your story can be told through social media. That’s where people feel like they connect with you and resonate with you and they know you, but there’s just so much. I’m not going to get on my stories and talk to the people, like how I talk to you on FaceTime when I’m venting about something that’s just happened to me. You can see it in my eyes and you can feel it in the way that I sing whenever I am writing or recording or performing. I think what I’m most excited for people to learn about me is how much is always happening at any given point in time. What I’m excited for about the press tour is for people to see that it’s not always that serious. I really am somewhat of a bit of a goofball. I think that’ll come through a little bit, especially being with Walker and Aryan and the rest of the cast. I’m just going to be a little bit cuckoo. That’s going to be really fun because I feel like you don’t see enough of that of me out there. I don’t know how to get that out there.
DK: I feel like the world hasn’t gotten to know the joy of your personality yet. I’m excited.
DG: People know Dior as a statue. They don’t know Dior as who I am for real. So I’m excited for that.
DK: She’s so cool and so special and so wonderful – everyone should be lucky to get to know her.
DG: Thank you, baby. I love you so much. Thank you for doing this interview. I had so much fun. You came with good questions, too. You were very honest.
DK: Thank you.
Percy Jackson & The Olympians returns for season two, coming to Disney+ on 10 December
Dior wears ALEXANDRE VAUTHIER bodysuit, PĪFERI boots, CRUIZE necklace, THE ARCHIVE X YANA NECKLACE
