Scarlett Johansson has candidly reflected on feeling like her career was already over after being "hypersexualised" during her early career.
The now 37-year-old actress was only a teenager when she saw her breakthrough in Hollywood with the comedy Ghost World in 2001 before transitioning into two adult roles in the drama Girl with a Pearl Earring and the romantic comedy-drama Lost in Translation, where she was cast to play a character five years older than her actual age, in 2003.
And speaking about the transition, Scarlett said on Dax Shepard's podcast Armchair Expert: "I kind of became objectified and pigeonholed in this way where I felt like I wasn't getting offers for work for things that I wanted to do. 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."
This looks EPIC.
Talking about the hurdle that came in the way of her career, she added: "The runway is not long on that. So it was scary at that time. I attributed a lot of that to the fact that people thought I was much, much older than I was."
Black Widow actress Scarlett explained that she now sees a change in how younger actors can navigate the business.
"Now, I see younger actors that are in their 20s. It feels like they're allowed to be all these different things. It's another time, too. We're not even allowed to really pigeonhole other actors anymore, thankfully, right? People are much more dynamic."
While things are progressing, Scarlett explained that there is still a way to go for females not to feel objectified in the business.
"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," Scarlett explained. "It's so baked into our culture and society. It's hard for me to imagine that ever being not an element."
“Something I really had blocked out for years”.
And now that the star is in her thirties, she does find herself caught between two generations' approaches to dealing with patriarchy in the entertainment industry.
Scarlett noted: "We had our mothers who were like, 'Use whatever you can to get what the thing you need. Use your feminine wiles. Use your sexuality'. And then there's our generation, I think, that's done that and also [said], 'This doesn't feel right, there's gotta be some other way.' And there's the younger generation of women who are like fifteen years younger than me, who are 'You don't have to take any of that crap. No pandering.' There's this system that's completely rejected. It's an interesting place to be in the in-between of."
So, how does Scarlett Johansson sum up the progress in the business now? Well, she says it's "two steps forward and two steps back". She concluded: "I think if you don't leave room for people to figure it out, then the actual progressive change doesn't really happen."
“Time to save the universe”.
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