The most devastating moment of Scarlett Johansson’s career: “It was a kind of an exploitation”
Scarlett Johansson has quietly built one of the most interesting careers in Hollywood. Any actor who takes on a long-running role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be accused of selling their soul to capitalism at the expense of art. However, if you really take time to assess Johansson’s career, you’ll realise that her stint as Black Widow is actually one of the things that makes her such an interesting creature of Hollywood instead of a blandly predictable one. How many other actors could make The Horse Whisperer, Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Avengers, Marriage Story, and Under the Skin?
Let’s rewind all the way to the beginning of her career because it’s easy to forget that she started acting in movies when she was just a kid. She got to play Sean Connery’s daughter in 1995’s Just Cause before landing her first lead role in the 1996 indie drama Manny & Lo, which, incidentally, was the movie that first caught the attention of Sofia Coppola. She gained more attention for playing a supporting role in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer in 1998, but it wasn’t until Coppola cast her as a young student suffering from world-induced dysphoria in Lost in Translation that she became a star.
It was Johansson’s first adult role, and, like many female actors blessed with flawless genes, it forced her into the gilded cage of sex symbol typecasting for nearly a decade. Coppola wasn’t to blame. It was largely fuelled by a string of collaborations with professional creep, Woody Allen. Johansson would later call this period a low point in her career. In a 2025 interview with Vanity Fair, she talked about how disconcerting it was to reach her late teens and find herself the subject of the salacious male gaze.
“You come into your sexuality and your desirability as part of your growth, and it’s exciting to blossom into yourself,” she said. “You’re wearing the clothes you want, you’re expressing yourself, then you suddenly turn around and you’re like, ‘Wait, I feel like I’m being’—I don’t want to say exploited because it’s such a severe word… but yeah, it was a kind of an exploitation.”
No one who was watching her career at that point could disagree. Five decades after Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and Brigitte Bardot (to name a few) offered cautionary tales of how Hollywood could ruin the lives and identities of women they were supposedly worshipping, Johansson was being forced to walk the same plank.
It was Marvel that turned out, weirdly enough, to be her salvation. Johansson would later credit the franchise with helping her break out of the box that the industry had forced her into and paving the way for much more experimental work like Under the Skin and auteur-driven movies like the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar, Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit, and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. It’s easy to condemn the franchise as the single worst thing to happen to creativity in Hollywood since George Lucas first sketched a lightsaber, but you can’t fault Johansson for championing it (pay discrimination aside).
There are countless female actors who have been exploited for their looks in Hollywood, many of whom see their careers decline as soon as they hit 30 (no matter how vampirically youthful they manage to look). Luckily, Johansson side-stepped this trajectory by leaning into her love of blockbusters and desire to tackle complex roles. Recently, she’s earned stellar reviews for directing, suggesting that she might have yet another avenue to explore.
