Scarlett Johansson says that she was molded as “a bombshell-type of actor” early in her career. In a new interview on Tuesday (December 13), the Black Widow star said that she felt she had landed in a “weird fever dream” after filming the 2003 movies Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring in her teenage years.
Now, the 38-year-old actress says, “It sort of was my transition into my adult career.” She notes that she experienced “a really hard time doing Lost in Translation.” The actress added, “I kind of became like an ingénue, sort of, and I just think that’s part of — young girls like that are really objectified, and that’s just a fact. I did Lost in Translation and Girl With the Pearl Earring and by that point, I was 18, 19, and I was coming into my own womanhood and learning my own desirability and sexuality. I think it was because of that trajectory I had been sort of launched towards — I really got stuck.”
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During her early acting career, Johansson said, “I was kind of being groomed, in a way, to be this what you call a bombshell-type of actor.” She felt that “playing the other woman and the object of desire” left her feeling “cornered in this place like I couldn’t get out of it.” Scarlett credited Creative Artists Agency partner Bryan Lourd for helping her turn her career around. “It would be easy to sit across from someone in that situation and go, ‘This is working, why change it?’ But for that kind of bombshell, you know, that burns bright and quick and then it’s done and you don’t have opportunity beyond that.”
In June 2021, Johansson said that her character Natasha Romanov AKA Black Widow was “talked about like she’s a piece of something, like a possession or a thing or whatever — like a piece of a–, really.” Johansson noted that Tony Stark “even refers to her as something like that at one point. What does he say? ‘I want some.’ Yeah and at one point calls her a piece of meat and maybe at that time that actually felt like a compliment. You know what I mean? Because my thinking was different.”