Scarlett Johansson Opens Up About Feeing “Hypersexualised” And “Objectified” In Hollywood

For a very long time, Scarlett Johansson’s identify was synonymous with the phrase bombshell. The actress typically performed roles that lent into her breathtaking magnificence and intercourse attraction: the mysterious blonde within the grocery store in He’s Simply Not That Into You and the adventurous American vacationer Vicky Cristina Barcelona. However in a brand new interview, Johansson says this wasn’t fully her alternative: after getting into Hollywood at a younger age and having one in all her breakout roles be one wherein she was deemed a intercourse image, she discovered she wasn’t supplied a lot else to work with.

Throughout a visitor look on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, the 37-year-old mentioned she bought “pigeonholed” into “this bizarre hypersexualised factor” as a working actress in Hollywood from a younger age, and located in consequence she wasn’t getting any affords for work that she really wished to do as she bought older. 

Johansson has been appearing since she was 9 years previous, having made her onscreen debut within the 1994 movie North. Certainly one of her early breakout roles got here in Sofia Coppola’s Misplaced in Translation, the place she starred reverse Invoice Murray. She was a youngster – 17 years previous on the time – however was forged to play a personality 5 years older than her precise age. Due to this, Johansson says individuals within the business considered her as older than she was. 

“I keep in mind considering to myself, ‘I believe individuals suppose I’m 40 years previous.’ It one way or the other stopped being one thing that was fascinating and one thing that I used to be preventing towards.”

“As a result of I believe everyone thought I used to be older and that I’d been [acting] for a very long time, I bought form of pigeonholed into this bizarre hypersexualized factor. I felt like [my career] was over,” she defined. “It was like, ‘That’s the form of profession you could have, these are the roles you’ve performed.’ And I used to be like, ‘That is it?’”

She added, “The runway shouldn’t be lengthy on that. So it was scary at the moment. In a bizarre approach, I used to be like, ‘Is that this it?’ I attributed plenty of that to the truth that individuals thought I used to be a lot, a lot older than I used to be.”

Fortunately, Johansson says she’s witnessed firsthand a change in Hollywood, particularly on the subject of the sorts of roles younger actors are supplied. “Now, I see youthful actors which are of their 20s. It looks like they’re allowed to be all these various things,” she mentioned. “It’s one other time, too. We’re not even allowed to essentially pigeonhole different actors anymore, fortunately, proper? Persons are rather more dynamic.”

Regardless of this, girls are nonetheless having to work to be recognised in the identical approach males are. “We dwell in a patriarchy, and I really feel like there’s a elementary actuality of the lady’s situation that can all the time, even when these 600 males usually are not actively aggressive essentially as a lot as they’d have been a minute in the past, it’s nonetheless essentially there,” Johansson mentioned. “It’s so baked into our tradition and society. It’s exhausting for me to think about that ever being not a component.”

She continued, “I’ve come to this realisation that it’s vital to know progress and alter when it’s actually significant — it takes two steps ahead and two steps again, after which it will get higher after which it will get worse. It’s not finite.”