Scarlett Johansson remembered in an interview with Vanity Fair her career getting pigeonholed by “sex object” roles after the breakout success of Sofia Coppola’s 2003’s “Lost in Translation,” which cast a 17-year-old Johansson opposite Bill Murray.
“After ‘Lost in Translation,’ every role that I was offered for years was ‘the girlfriend,’ ‘the other woman,’ a sex object—I couldn’t get out of the cycle,” Johansson said. “It sort of felt like, ‘Oh, I guess this is my identity now as an actor.’ There wasn’t much I could do with that.”
Johansson added that her representatives at the time did not help her try to avoid these roles, although “they were reacting to the norm. The industry worked like that forever.”
“You come into your sexuality and your desirability as part of your growth, and it’s exciting to blossom into yourself,” she continued. “You’re wearing the clothes you want, you’re expressing yourself, then you suddenly turn around and you’re like, ‘Wait, I feel like I’m being’—I don’t want to say exploited because it’s such a severe word. That term is so heavy, but yeah, it was a kind of an exploitation.”
“Lost in Translation” stars Murray as a fading movie star in Tokyo who befriends Johansson’s college graduate amid a midlife crisis. Johansson would not go into specifics but did say “Bill was in a hard place” during the film’s production, adding: “Everybody was on tenterhooks around him, including our director and the full crew, because he was dealing with his… stuff.”
Johansson said she never had worked with an actor in Murray’s “headspace” before. The two performers ran into each other earlier this year behind the scenes of “SNL50,” where Murray was in a much more spirited mood.
“He’s such a different person now. I think life has humbled him,” Johansson said, confirming she was partly referring to his behavior on the set of the 2022 movie “Being Mortal” that resulted in the project being shut down. Murray said earlier this year that he gave a woman on set a kiss through a mask, although he maintained he was just being silly.
“Certainly, yes—that was really bad,” Johansson said. “But I also know COVID was a hard thing for him. Life—all these things have led up to him being held accountable for that kind of behavior. But you know what? How wonderful that people can change.”
Speaking of her experience on “Lost in Translation” at large, Johansson added: “I’m pretty proud of how I handled myself. I really just did the work, you know? It’s a good tactic for pushing through stuff. Eyes on the prize.”
Head over to Vanity Fair’s website to read Johansson’s cover story in its entirety.
