Scarlett Johansson Says She Was ‘Objectified’ & ‘Groomed’ As A Young Actress

Scarlett Johansson is best known for playing Black Widow in the MCU. She was the world’s highest-paid actress in 2018 and 2019 and was also featured multiple times on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. Scarlett Johansson recently opened up about being “objectified” and “groomed” as a young actor.

Scarlett Johansson recently appeared for an interview on Dax Shepard’s podcast “Armchair Expert.” She opened up about her former concern that she was being groomed to only portray “hypersexualized” characters. Johansson said that she was worried about everybody thinking that she was older.

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.

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. 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?

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Johansson made her acting debut as a young child star in “North” and “Home Alone 3.” By the time she was in her late teens, she was getting offers for more serious films like “Ghost World” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” by the Coen Brothers. She was portraying the love interest in films like Woody Allen’s “Match Point” and the noir “The Black Dahlia” when she was in her 20s.

Johansson called that period of her career “frightening,” since she believed she would never get past those jobs. All of that changed when she was cast as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, making her one of Hollywood’s top box office draws. Stay tuned to Thirsty for more such stories.

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