The one movie Scarlett Johansson begged to be cast in: “Hey, I’m available”
The biggest stars in Hollywood are the ones least likely to find themselves begging for roles, but Scarlett Johansson constantly found herself on the outside looking in after her pleas to fulfil a lifelong dream repeatedly fell on deaf ears.
The cache from her recurring role as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Natasha Romanoff helped make her one of her generation’s highest-paid female actors, and she only ended up with that part because Emily Blunt – the first choice for the character – was forced into making the dreadful Gulliver’s Travels instead.
Usually, when Johansson’s name is mentioned in conjunction with a high-profile project, casting directors, filmmakers, and studio heads will jump at the opportunity to sign her up. And yet, despite desperately wanting a chance to relive a cherished childhood experience in a way that only an A-list actor can, nobody was willing to bite.
Johansson was only eight years old when Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park thundered into theatres in the summer of 1993, and like almost everyone in the same age range, she was immediately obsessed with the classic blockbuster. She began her career the very next year by appearing in Rob Reiner’s atrocious North, but she already knew exactly what her dream was.
Even as she went from strength to strength and Universal kept returning to the well with Spielberg’s sequel The Lost World, Joe Johnson’s Jurassic Park III, and the Jurassic World trilogy, nobody seemed to listen to the two-time Academy Award nominee telling everyone that all she ever wanted was to run away screaming from rampaging dinosaurs.
“I have been trying to get into the franchise for like 15 years, like really to do anything at all,” she admitted. “I mean, I would happily die immediately.” As fate would have it, even though the interminable Jurassic World Dominion was heavily implied to be the final chapter, it was revealed less than two years after its release that another one was in the works. Who was the first name announced for the cast of 2025’s Rebirth? At long last, it was Johansson.
“I was really crazy about the film,” she told Vanity Fair of the original. “I slept in a Jurassic Park tent in my bedroom I shared with my sister for a year. Anytime the trades would report a new Jurassic movie, I would forward it to my agents like, ‘Hey, I’m available.'”
Will Jurassic World Rebirth be any good? Based on how the last couple turned out, maybe, maybe not. Either way, Johansson doesn’t really care when, after a decade and a half of pestering her agents and anyone involved in a new instalment that it’s the only thing she’s wanted to be in since her youngest days, the actor will finally get her wish.
