Scarlett Johansson got real about being typecast in Hollywood during a guest appearance on the Table for Two podcast.
The Tony-winning actress spoke candidly about her experience after filming Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring as a teenager, the aftermath of which she described as a "weird fever dream."
"It sort of was my transition into my adult career," she said, adding that she had "a really hard time doing Lost in Translation."
"I kind of became like an ingénue, sort of, and I just think that’s part of—young girls like that are really objectified, and that’s just a fact," the Black Widow star continued. "I did Lost in Translation and Girl with the Pearl Earring and by that point, I was 18, 19, and I was coming into my own womanhood and learning my own desirability and sexuality. I think it was because of that trajectory I had been sort of launched towards, I really got stuck."
Reflecting on the start of her career, Johansson said, "I was kind of being groomed, in a way, to be this what you call a bombshell type of actor."
When it came to "playing the other woman and the object of desire," she felt "cornered in this place, like I couldn’t get out of it."
She described the allure of settling for the kind of roles she was being considered for.
"It would be easy to sit across from someone in that situation and go, ‘This is working, why change it?’" she said. "But for that kind of bombshell, you know, that burns bright and quick and then it’s done and you don’t have opportunity beyond that."
Scarlett Johansson wins the 2004 BAFTA for Best Leading Actress for her role in Lost in Translation.Mike Marsland//Getty Images
Johansson previously talked about feeling "hypersexualized" and "objectified" while speaking to Dax Shepard on 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," she said at the time. "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."
She added, "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?’"
