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For a long time, Scarlett Johansson’s name was synonymous with the word bombshell. The actress often played roles that lent into her breathtaking beauty and sex appeal: the mysterious blonde in the supermarket in He’s Just Not That Into You and the adventurous American tourist Vicky Cristina Barcelona. But in a new interview, Johansson says this wasn’t entirely her choice: after entering Hollywood at a young age and having one of her breakout roles be one in which she was deemed a sex symbol, she found she wasn’t offered much else to work with.
During a guest appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, the 37-year-old said she got “pigeonholed” into “this weird hypersexualised thing” as a working actress in Hollywood from a young age, and found as a result she wasn’t getting any offers for work that she actually wanted to do as she got older.
Johansson has been acting since she was nine years old, having made her onscreen debut in the 1994 film North. One of her early breakout roles came in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, where she starred opposite Bill Murray. She was a teenager – 17 years old at the time – but was cast to play a character five years older than her actual age. Because of this, Johansson says people in the industry thought of her as older than she was.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘I think people think I’m 40 years old.’ It somehow stopped being something that was desirable and something that I was fighting against.”
“Because I think everybody thought I was older and that I’d been [acting] for a long time, I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hypersexualized thing. I felt like [my career] was over,” she explained. “It was like, ‘That’s the kind of career you have, these are the roles you’ve played.’ And I was like, ‘This is it?'”
She added, “The runway is not long on that. So it was scary at that time. In a weird way, I was like, ‘Is this it?’ I attributed a lot of that to the fact that people thought I was much, much older than I was.”
Thankfully, Johansson says she’s witnessed firsthand a change in Hollywood, especially when it comes to the kinds of roles young actors are offered. “Now, I see younger actors that are in their 20s. It feels like they’re allowed to be all these different things,” she said. “It’s another time, too. We’re not even allowed to really pigeonhole other actors anymore, thankfully, right? People are much more dynamic.”
Despite this, women are still having to work to be recognised in the same way men are. “We live in a patriarchy, and I feel like there’s a fundamental reality of the woman’s condition that will always, even if those 600 men are not actively aggressive necessarily as much as they would have been a minute ago, it’s still fundamentally there,” Johansson said. “It’s so baked into our culture and society. It’s hard for me to imagine that ever being not an element.”
She continued, “I’ve come to this realisation that it’s important to understand progress and change when it’s really meaningful — it takes two steps forward and two steps back, and then it gets better and then it gets worse. It’s not finite.”
