How serial killers and singing nannies shaped Scarlett Johansson: “I loved it”
When Scarlett Johansson was growing up, her mum fostered a love of cinema by showing her every film she’d loved as a child.
This meant three-year-old Johansson received a crash course in colourful narratives like Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, Rosalind Russell’s screwball comedies such as His Girl Friday, and Montgomery Clift vehicles; nothing scarring for a child receptive to the world’s magic. To be honest, though, the latter may primarily have been an excuse for her mum to gawp at the handsome Old Hollywood star and repeat, “Isn’t he so gorgeous?” which likely flew right over the head of her young daughter.
For Johansson, the musical that had the biggest impact on her starred Julie Andrews. You know the one: an unhappy family in Edwardian London needs to hire a new nanny to whip the unruly children into shape, so they pick the first one who floats down out of the sky on a magical umbrella; it’s a story as old as Santa Claus.
In all seriousness, though, the actor loved Mary Poppins as a kid, and it helped form half of her desire to go into show business. Imagine her delight, then, when she signed up to make The Nanny Diaries in 2007, which cast her as the long-suffering nanny for a dysfunctional New York family. The movie even featured a dream sequence that purposely evoked Mary Poppins, requiring Johansson to squeeze herself into a safety harness before being crane-lifted high above the streets of ‘The Big Apple’. Julie Andrews, eat your heart out.
Having said that, cheerful singing nannies only make up half of Johansson’s formative film loves, and that’s because her mum didn’t only show her musicals and Old Hollywood classics; she also wanted her children to be aware of the great movies of their era. So when she was only seven, her mother sat her down to watch a Jodie Foster classic. You know the one: an inexperienced female FBI agent needs help catching a serial killer who loves skinning women, so she consults with the first cannibal she finds in the loony bin.
Obviously, this is a gross misrepresentation of The Silence of the Lambs, one of the greatest thrillers ever put to celluloid. It’s arguably the finest serial killer movie ever made, with only David Fincher’s Se7en being a legitimate competitor for top spot, and the central performances from Foster, Anthony Hopkins, and Ted Levine are all stunning.
However, if there’s one thing most people wouldn’t do with The Silence of the Lambs, it’s show it to children, let alone one as young as Johansson. Despite being far too tender an age, though, she somehow wasn’t traumatised, and she didn’t think her mum was out of line. She smiled, “If anyone ever questioned my mum’s parenting approach, she’d say that all her children were very mature”. Amazingly, this outlook was soon proven 100% correct.
You see, at the ripe old age of seven, the actor informed her mother that Clarice Starling’s skin-crawling adventure had convinced her she wanted to act, so it was about time she helped her make the first step. “I told my mom to take us all to the talent agency,” she chuckled to The Sunday Herald in 2001.
However, to the young girl’s horror, the agency wasn’t interested in her, nor twin brother Hunter, or older sister Vanessa. Instead, they tagged older brother Adrian as a star in the making, and even signed him on that very day. “It was so devastating,” she recalled, “It wasn’t even the rejection. There was something inside me. I always wanted to do it”.
Naturally, after Johansson made her big-screen debut two years later at only nine, her deep love of films as disparate as Mary Poppins and The Silence of the Lambs helped her balance projects of all genres, all the way from childhood into adult superstardom. It’s safe to say the talent agent probably kicked themselves when they realised they’d picked the wrong sibling. Whoops.
