Scarlett Johansson said that her mother told her to use whatever you can to get ahead, to use her sexuality.
The ‘Black Widow’ star revealed her experience of being “objectified” in Hollywood during a appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. “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’.
Scarlett Johansson Said she was ‘Groomed’ to Be a ‘Bombshell-Type of Actor’ Early in Her Career. Scarlett said she felt “Hypersexualized” in Hollywood from a Young Age.
“I was kind of being groomed, in a way, to be this what you call a bombshell-type of actor,”
Scarlett Johansson
The actress said that playing the other woman and the object of desire left her feeling cornered in this place. She said it felt like I couldn’t get out of it.
One of her early breakout roles came in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, starring opposite Bill Murray. Though she was just 17 years old at that time, she was cast to play a character five years older than her actual age.
The now 37-year-old actress was only a teenager when she landed her first ‘adult’ roles in the drama Girl with a Pearl Earring and the romantic comedy-drama Lost in Translation.
“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,” she explained. “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?'”
Current generation is more confident
Scarlett Johansson is impressed with current generation of young stars. She Said “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 is completely rejected.”
Johansson said that the landscape has shifted for younger actors now, such as Zendaya and Florence Pugh. “They’re allowed to be all these different things, they can play all different things,” said the actor.
Johansson said while #MeToo has seen improvement in working conditions for young women actors, there is still a lot of work to be done.
She said: “I’ve come to this realization that it’s important to understand progress and change when it’s really meaningful. It takes two steps forward and two steps back, and then it gets better and then it gets worse.
