After much speculation and rumored talks, the lead roles for director Sam Taylor-Wood’s adaptation of Fifty Shades Of Grey, the wildly popular erotic romance novel by E. L. James, were announced.

Universal revealed today that Dakota Johnson will star as 21-year-old naive college student Anastasia “Ana” Steele, with Charlie Hunnam in the role of her 27-year-old experienced lover Christian Grey, according to James, who posted the news to Twitter.

The 23-year-old Johnson, who is the daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, was in The Social Network, Five Year Engagement, and the film version of 21 Jump Street. The 33-year-old Hunnam has been a lead cast member of the FX television drama Sons of Anarchy since 2008, but recently received some international popularity this summer as the lead in Guillermo Del Toro’s action film Pacific Rim. In 1999, the actor got his big break starring in 10 episodes in the British series Queer as Folk, as a self-confident gay teenager.

In the novel, Ana is an innocent, unworldly young student who falls for young entrepreneur Christian Grey, who has a need for control and a taste for the erotic, specifically S&M. From what I understand, there’s lots of sex and S&M in the book, which your average housewife apparently goes crazy for, based on the amount of times I’ve seen women on the bus, train, nail and hair salon, etc., reading this book, as well as how insanely well this novel and its sequels sold. We can expect to see a lot of skin and kinkiness from Johnson and Hunnam in the film adaptation.

Fifty Shades Of Grey is scheduled to hit theaters on August 1, 2014.

[Source: Buzzfeed | Dakota Johnson and Charlie Hunnam photos courtesy of Shutterstock. Used with permission.]

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