Scarlett Johansson on Breaking Away from Hyper Sexualized Type Casting Close Up

I'm curious how important it is for all of you to sort of shift what people expect from you based on your choices. It's so different now. The climate is so different now. There's so many wonderful opportunities for women of every age to, you know, play all different types of people. And, you know, I feel when I was working in my early twenties and even like my late teens, early twenties, you know, I felt that I sort of got somehow typecast as I was like very kind of hyper-sexualized, which was, I guess, you know, at the time seemed okay to everyone. It was another time. Even though it wasn't part of my own narrative, it was kind of crafted for me by probably a bunch of dudes in the industry. And, you know, I guess that worked then. But it was really difficult for me to try to figure out how to get out of being an ingenue or the other woman because it was never anything that I had intended. You know, I've been working since I was eight years old and certainly that was never like a goal of mine. I sort of had to kind of shake it up a little bit because I just couldn't seem to, I just didn't want to work on stuff that I like knew how to do and knew I could do it. And it was like, what is this? I remember thinking at the time like maybe I need a different job in this industry that would sort of be more fulfilling because there seemed like there was just no where to go. And so I actually had the opportunity to do a play, to do an Arthur Miller play on Broadway and it totally reset my whole way of thinking about how I could work and what the different kind of opportunities that could be available to me. And it's amazing how theater is limitless, you know. And it just felt so, even though it was terrifying, it felt, it was liberating because I actually felt that every night I had the opportunity to change the narrative and I had, as Lupita had said earlier, you have control of your own kind of fate on stage to some degree and you're in charge of your own destiny up there. You have two very different films that have come out. Is there one that was sort of more intimidating for you than the other? I don't know if intimidated is really the right word exactly. I think both of those films, even though they're really different, the thing they do have in common is that the scripts were like beautiful little gems, both scripts. And Laura read, obviously, Marriage Story and it was such a, it was incredible. I mean, it was just every, I think what people that have seen it don't necessarily realize is that every hesitation and every unfinished sentence is all scripted and Noah's really, it's the words are the words and you have to stick to that. It was there. Yeah, it's all right there and he's a real stickler about that, which is fine. But you have to, you have this kind of structure and then you figure it out. It was challenging at times just because Noah's relentless and he works to exhaustion. I've never really been able to have that experience, just burning film like that. It's something you do when you do theater because you just keep, it's one of the beautiful things about doing theater is that you get that chance over and over again to figure it out and you do it, you figure it out every night and it's so exciting because you surprise yourself all the time and you're stuck with this text. And that's kind of the experience that I certainly and Laura had too is you had all this opportunity to just try it all out and it was challenging but it also, you kind of keep coming back to, okay, I can't stray from this so I'm going to make these discoveries within the confines of this text. It was not, I wouldn't say intimidating, but it was challenging definitely. I was intimidated when I read your monologue and watched you tirelessly learning it. Fumble through it? No, my God, no. Fail. And makeup and hair and we would run lines and I would listen to you memorizing it and take one was flawless, this human being opening her heart and telling this entire story. Not one word missed. I was just mesmerized. It was amazing to watch you do that. All the actors were handshy when Noah walked past. Yeah. I didn't add a then. I wasn't a then.