Many Hollywood stars rehearse the answers they are going to give in interviews with their publicists for fear that some unfortunate opinion will be lynched on social networks. Let them say it if not to Scarlett Johansson, who has had to put up with criticism in the past from an audience that did not understand how someone like her could, for example, defend Woody Allen when the rest of the industry put a cordon sanitaire on your surroundings.
Of course, she is not exactly someone who has decided to keep quiet to avoid these situations. Or at least that’s what she demonstrates during her latest interview with the American edition of Vanity Fair. A long conversation in which the actress explains why she intends to continue expressing her opinion even though it seems politically incorrect to some.
“I don’t dedicate myself to politics and that’s why I can’t lie about what I feel about some issues. It is not part of my personality ”, declares the actress in the magazine, of which she is the cover.
“I don’t want to have to censor myself, or gauge what I say or think. I can’t live that way, ”she defends herself. “I also think that when you have this kind of integrity, people are more likely to be affected by what you say in the wrong way. It’s normal, I guess ”, she sentences.
For example, despite the criticism received, Scarlett continues to defend Woody Allen, with whom she has worked on several films. “Although I have sometimes felt more vulnerable for giving my opinion on it, I think it is dangerous not to do so for fear of the visceral response that people may have to your words. To me, that’s not progressive at all. It rather scares me,” she explains.
Of course, there is one thing that she does regret: the way in which she handled the criticism they made of her for accepting a role as a transsexual woman instead of allowing an actress who was one in real life to do so.
“I think I handled the situation very badly and in my first reaction I was not sensitive to the situation. I wasn’t aware at the time how the trans community felt about cisgender actors playing these types of roles. I didn’t know that conversation was there,” she apologizes. “I learned a lot from everything that happened and I realized that I misjudged the people who criticized me. But it was very hard, like a whirlwind. And I felt horrible,” she admits.
In relation to Black Widow…
It took a long time for the Marvel studios to give the green light to the Black Widow solo movie, the character that Scartlett Johansson has been playing for years for the Avengers franchise. But regardless of whether it will be good or bad, the important thing is that this shows how much Hollywood’s attitude towards its actresses has changed for the better in recent years.
And precisely about that, about the differences in the scripts that they offer her compared to those that came to her a decade or two ago, is what Johansson has talked about at length during a round table for Hollywood Reporter in which they also participated companions like Laura Dern, Renée Zellweger or Jennifer Lopez.
A relaxed conversation between the performers who are most likely to be nominated for an Oscar this year in which Scarlett acknowledged regretting having played so many “hypersexualized” characters in the past. Of course, her fault was not entirely hers.
“Now everything is different. The atmosphere is very different. But I feel like when I was in my twenties I was pigeonholed into a certain type of role. I was very hypersexualized,” she explained.
“I guess back then she was okay with everyone. They were different times. But that personality was not part of my own narrative. Most likely a bunch of guys in the industry created it specifically for me. And it worked, but for years it was really difficult for me to try to get out of characters that were either a naive girl or directly ‘the other’ woman of the protagonist, ”she revealed.
That made Scarlett consider leaving the world of acting for a while, but after she was offered the opportunity to star in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge on Broadway, everything changed. This she called seemed to reset her career in the entertainment world and made her get many bigger opportunities. It even earned her a Tony Award for the category ‘Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play’ in 2010.
“That made me start to see differently the way I worked and all the other options that were open to me. The theater does not put those limits on you, ”said Johansson, who won a Tony Award for that performance. “Of course I was terrified, but I was also liberated because on opening night I felt for the first time that I had been given the opportunity to change the narrative of my life,” concluded the actress.
As one of the victims, actress Scarlett Johansson expressed her opposition to pornographic films that manipulate other people’s faces to be used in the film. She warned that internet users should be careful about this, referring to explicit photos of Scarlett Johansson available at some sites like mrskin.com.
She admitted that it was difficult for her to regulate and prohibit such pornographic films. In an interview with the Washington Post, she lamented the existence of a “dark hole” created by the creators of pornographic content.
Scarlet Johansson said she was quite frustrated that a dangerous internet user, with vast resources and time, could set up international copyright laws to share fake pornographic images with other people’s faces.
“Obviously this doesn’t affect me much because people think it’s not me in the porn, however demeaning it is,” said the voice actor in the film Her.
“Vulnerable people such as women, children and the elderly should be more careful to protect their identity and personal content. That will never change no matter how strict Google makes their policies,” she added.