The life-changing role Scarlett Johansson landed when Emily Blunt turned it down: “I was really devastated by it”
Being a young female star in Hollywood is tougher than it looks, despite all the glamorous red carpet photos. Simply landing a standout role that grabs headlines or box office returns isn’t enough. Since the dawn of the industry, young female actors have been especially vulnerable to typecasting, with their youthful looks often becoming characters in themselves. Everyone from Jean Harlow to Cameron Diaz has been slotted into the ingénue role, and it takes a mix of luck, determination, skill, and smart management to break free of it.
Scarlett Johansson is one of the most prominent examples of a young actor who was typecast for her looks and had to spend years trying to prove her versatility. She started out as a child actor, appearing in movies like North and Manny & Lo before landing a breakout role in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer in 1998 when she was 14. Everything changed when Sofia Coppola, having been impressed with the young actor’s early performances, cast her in Lost in Translation.
Although the film isn’t overtly romantic and Johansson isn’t particularly sexualised in the role, it started a pattern. “After Lost in Translation,” Johansson told Vanity Fair in 2025, “Every role that I was offered for years was ‘the girlfriend,’ ‘the other woman,’ a sex object—I couldn’t get out of the cycle.” A trio of movies with Woody Allen, The Nanny Diaries, and He’s Just Not That Into You, sealed the deal, and it wasn’t until 2010, a full seven years after Lost in Translation, that she managed to change the narrative.
The movie that she hoped would break the cycle is a surprising one: Iron Man 2. The Marvel Cinematic Universe might not be known as the greatest acting showcase in Hollywood, but Johansson wanted to do something different and thought it could help reframe her public persona.
The only trouble was that she didn’t actually win the role of Natasha Romanoff, otherwise known as The Black Widow. The part had been offered to Emily Blunt, who was fresh off a spate of highly acclaimed movies such as Sunshine Cleaning and The Young Victoria.
“It felt like everything was aligning, and then it didn’t happen,” Johansson remembered. “And I was really devastated by it.” Luckily for her, Blunt had a scheduling conflict and had to turn the part down. Being brought into the MCU fold was a game-changer for the Lost in Translation star. It didn’t win her rave reviews, but it did set her on a new path. Now prominent for a different kind of role, she was able to seek more diverse opportunities.
Counterintuitively, you can draw a direct line between Johansson’s involvement in Iron Man 2 and her roles in movies like Under the Skin, Her, and the films that got her nominated for two Oscars in one year, Jojo Rabbit and Marriage Story. There is a pretty strong argument to be made that the Marvel franchise has crippled the market for those very types of movies, but as far as Johansson’s career is concerned, it was a godsend.
