I’ve been hypersexualised from a young age, says Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson thinks she’s been “objectified” during her career.
The 37-year-old actress – who shot to stardom as a child actor – feels she’s been “hypersexualised” from a young age.
Scarlett told the ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast: “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.”
Scarlett remembers feeling “pigeonholed” after starring alongside Bill Murray in the Sofia Coppola-directed ‘Lost in Translation’.
The Hollywood star – who was still a teenager when she filmed the movie – said: “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 hypersexualised 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?'”
Scarlett played a character five years her senior in ‘Lost in Translation’, and the actress can still recall fearing for her career after the film’s release.
She shared: “The runway is not long on that. So it was scary at that time. In a weird way, I was like, ‘Is this it?’ I attributed a lot of that to the fact that people thought I was much, much older than I was.”
By contrast, Scarlett thinks the landscape is dramatically different for young actresses these days.
She said: “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.”
