Scarlett Johansson appeared on CBS Sunday Morning this past weekend, and she ended up talking about the early ‘00s and what it was like to “come of age” in front of the whole world. She’s 41, born in November 1984. Scarlett was often held up as an example of a child actor who successfully transitioned into an adult career, but I also remember how much attention she received when she was in her teens and early 20s. It’s gross to think back on the cultural discourse when she was, like, 18 or 19, and before she even really knew herself.
Scarlett Johansson is revisiting how life as a famous person felt in the 2000s when she was a teenager and in her early 20s. Johansson, 41, sat down for an interview on CBS Sunday Morning April 12 to discuss her new skincare line, The Outset, and her decades-long career as an actor. “It was such another time, too,” she said, when asked if she believed the public was “a little too focused on [her] looks” when she was a young woman.
“I think growing up in the entertainment industry and being 20 something years old in the early 2000s, being a 20-year-old woman in the early 2000s in the spotlight, I think in general it was just a really harsh time,” Johansson said. “I think women were just pulled apart for how they looked in a way that was socially acceptable at the time and it was tough. There was a lot placed on how women looked and what was offered at that time for women my age as far as acting roles or opportunities, it was much slimmer than it is now.”
Johansson made her screen acting debut in a 1994 episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien and appeared in a number of movies as a child star in the ’90s and early 2000s. She broke out as a major Hollywood star when she and Bill Murray costarred in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 movie, Lost in Translation, and has remained one of the most popular (and highest-grossing) actors in the movie industry for the last two decades.
“I think there’s much more empowering roles available to young actors now than when I was in my 20s,” she added in the interview. “It was slim pickins’, I would say.”
Johansson said on CBS Sunday Morning that she felt young actresses “would get really pigeonholed” in that time period and offered roles like “the other woman, or the side piece, the bombshell.”
“That was an archetype that there was just a lot of when I was that age,” she added. “It was kind of tricky to navigate around that because there was a lot more that I wanted to do, and I found that doing theatre in New York was a great way to work different muscles and get out of that pattern.”
There were slim pickins’ for young actresses in that time, but Scarlett wouldn’t know because she and Natalie Portman were offered pretty much all of the best roles for 20-somethings back then. It’s when both women hit their late 20s and early 30s that it felt like there was a real dearth of quality roles for women in general, which led to some crazy statements from Scarlett. It’s crazy to think about how many good films Scarlett was in before she was even 27 years old. As for the early ‘00s… I give the Millennials a lot of credit for moving the discourse away from the grossness of that era.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
