Scarlett Johansson claimed that Hollywood groomed her into becoming an objectified “bombshell” actress early in her career. The 38-year-old actress said she had to change course during her career to avoid being typecast.
Johansson appeared on the “Table for Two” podcast on Tuesday. She said her 2003 movies “Lost in Translation” and “Girl with a Pearl Earring” were a change from her childhood acting career to her adult progression.
“It sort of was my transition into my adult career,” Johansson said.
Johansson – who had been acting since age 9 – revealed that it was “a really hard time doing ‘Lost in Translation.'” The movie was directed by Sofia Coppola and starred Bill Murray and Giovanni Ribisi.
“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,” Johansson asserted. “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.”
The “Black Widow” actress added, “I think it was because of that trajectory I had been sort of launched towards — I really got stuck.”
Of her early adult acting roles, Johansson explained, “I was kind of being groomed, in a way, to be this what you call a bombshell-type of actor.”
“I was playing the ‘other woman’ and the object of desire,” she continued. “And, you know, I suddenly found myself cornered in this place, like I couldn’t get out of it.”
Johansson credited Bryan Lourd – her agent and co-chairman at the powerful Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency – for helping her not to get stereotyped into one specific kind of role.
The actress said of Lourd, “It would be easy to sit across from someone in that situation and go, ‘This is working, why change it?'”
She noted, “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.”
Johansson believes that her career started to shift when she starred in “Iron Man 2” and in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s play “A View from the Bridge.”
She stated, “It really came back to doing work – working at it and trying to carve a place in different projects and work in great ensembles.”
In October, Johansson said Hollywood “hypersexualized” her early in her career.
“Because I think everybody thought I was older and I’d been [acting] for a long time, and then I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hypersexualized thing,” she told Dax Shepard on the “Armchair Expert” podcast. “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, I guess.'”
Johansson said it is “scary” that “the runway is not long” for actresses who rely solely on their beauty.
You can listen to the entire Scarlett Johansson interview on “Table for Two” below.