Scarlett Johansson Says She Was "Hypersexualized" Early On In Her Career And People Treated Her Like She Was Much Older Than She Really Was
Scarlett Johansson has long been considered one of the sexiest women in Hollywood, but she says on a podcast interview that she was sexualized at too young of an age, adding that young actresses today aren't pigeonholed in the same way she was in her 20s.
The 37-year-old actress is known for her Black Widow role and her serious acting chops in A Marriage Story, and she's always been considered one of the most beautiful celebrities. She started acting at a very young age and she tells Dax Shepard on his podcast Armchair Expert that she was sexualized far too young.
Scarlett Johansson Says She Was "Hypersexualized" Early on in Her Career and People Treated Her Like She Was Much Older Than She Really Was
Scarlett reveals that she was only 7 years old when she started filming her first movie. She starred in a couple well-known films when she was only a teenager, such as Ghost World at age 15 and Lost in Translation at age 17. Dax pointed out that she was "labeled '15 going on 30' early" and this was both a blessing and a curse.
"Do you think at times people overestimated how old you were and assumed you might understand more than you knew and how much were you trying to deliver on that?" Dax asked.
Scarlett says she spent a lot of time around adults when she was only a kid, partly due to the fact that she grew up in Manhattan and was always around adults in the movie industry. She recalls being "in different situations that were not age-appropriate." But she says her mom "was really good about protecting me from a lot of that stuff," even though she wasn't able to protect her from everything.
"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 said. "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.'"
Being sexualized like this at a young age left Scarlett feeling pigeonholed. She felt like she wasn't able to be anything else in the industry than this sexy character, even though sex was "never a huge part of my actual personality."
"The runway is not long on that and so it was scary at that time," Scarlett continued. "And I attributed a lot of that to the fact that people thought I was much, much older than I was."
She adds that young actresses like Florence Pugh and Zendaya don't have to deal with the same kind of pigeonholing. "Now it's like, I see younger actors that are in their 20s, it feels like they're allowed to be all these different things," she said. "We're not even allowed to really pigeonhole actors anymore."
Scarlett has two children, one with her current husband Colin Jost and another with ex-husband Romain Dauriac.