Scarlett Johansson felt 'groomed' by Hollywood while playing 'object of desire' roles at age 18

Scarlett Johansson has revealed frustrations about her early career in Hollywood, as she felt prematurely forced into the role of a blonde bombshell at a young age.

The Black Widow star reflected on her days as a budding actress on Tuesday's episode of the Table for Two With Bruce Bozzi podcast, recalling that she felt the industry's desire to sexualize her as an "ingenue" when she was 18.

"I did Lost in Translation and Girl With a Pearl Earring — by that point I was 18, 19 — and I was coming into my own womanhood and learning my own desirability and sexuality," Johansson said. "I think because of that trajectory that I'd been sort of launched towards, I really got stuck in this — and, part of my management at the time, that was a big part of it, my agency and all that stuff — but I was kind of being groomed, in a way, to be what you call a bombshell-type of actor."

She continued, "I was playing the other woman and the object of desire. I suddenly found myself cornered in this place and I couldn't get out of it."

In Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, a then-17-year-old Johansson played a young woman visiting Tokyo with her husband, where she met an aging actor (Bill Murray), with whom she forged a deep platonic connection. In Girl With a Pearl Earring, she appeared as an alluring maid who became the subject of Johannes Vermeer's most famous painting.

Johansson also said she "definitely was in different situations that were not age-appropriate" when she was a young actress in an October episode of Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast.

"Because I think everybody thought I was older and I'd been [acting] for a long time and then I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hyper-sexualized thing," she said. "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, I guess.'"

Johansson's later career saw her taking on other complex roles, such as one half of an embattled couple in Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story and the mother of a young German boy during World War II in Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit — both of which earned the performer Oscar nominations at the 2020 Academy Awards.

Listen to Johansson's appearance on Table for Two above.

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