Recently, actress Scarlett Johansson (37 years old) shared in an interview that the way the public perceives her as a sex symbol of the contemporary screen is actually partly because she was “sexualized” from a young age, through the films she participated in.
Johansson made her screen debut at the age of nine in the 1994 film “North.” Because of her acting experience and her exposure to film sets at a young age, Johansson believes that she was often perceived as being more mature than her age, and was therefore given sexually charged roles early on. “People always thought I was much older than I actually was,” Johansson said.
Johansson began to become famous after appearing in “Lost in Translation” (2003) acting alongside actor Bill Murray. At that time, she played a 22-year-old girl, but in fact, when filming this movie, Johansson was only 17 years old.
Throughout Johansson’s experience in Hollywood since her teenage years, she said she encountered many sensitive situations that were not appropriate for her age, but luckily Johansson had a mother who was always by her side, trying to protect her daughter in every way, when she was active in the film industry from a young age.
In fact, Johansson felt “locked in” to sexually explicit roles since her teenage years, and this continued into her later life, leading her to be considered one of Hollywood’s “sex symbols.”
Scarlett Johansson said: “When I was a teenage actress, I was always given roles that were sexually explicit, which was acceptable at the time. Back then, even though my character didn’t have anything to do with being sexually explicit, my acting was always directed that way, and the people who came up with these ideas were always male directors.”
Scarlett Johansson has been widely mentioned for her role as Black Widow Natalie Rushman in “Black Widow” (2021). This superhero film is seen as a positive expression of the Hollywood film industry, when studios have given more worthy attention to big-budget films revolving around female characters.
However, Scarlett Johansson still frankly shared that she was very uncomfortable with the “sexualization” of the Black Widow character in “Iron Man 2” (2010). That was when the Black Widow character first appeared in the Marvel cinematic world.
“While “Iron Man 2″ was funny and had some great moments, I found the Black Widow character to be overly sexualized. Other characters spoke of her in a rather disrespectful way, as if she were an object, a commodity, a thing to be owned, and what was said about her was all about her physical beauty. At the time, such words could have been taken as compliments.
But I understand that a person’s true worth is not measured by such compliments, but like many other young women, I used to choose to avoid conflicts of opinion, I just kept quiet and withdrew from rude words and silently tried to redefine my own value,” Scarlett Johansson shared.
