The one role Scarlett Johansson has always wanted to play: “That is my goal”
Scarlett Johansson has been acting since she was a child. She made her feature film debut at the tender age of nine in Rob Reiner’s comedy adventure movie North in 1994 and had her breakthrough four years later in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer. In many ways, her career has mirrored that of Elizabeth Taylor. They both worked as child actors in Hollywood, got their big breaks in horse-related movies (Taylor’s was National Velvet), and both went on to become sex symbols whose acting skills were often undercut by their beauty.
Both women also starred in some of the most expensive movies ever made. When it was released in 1961, Taylor’s Cleopatra had the highest price tag of any film to ever hit theatres. Meanwhile, the Avengers franchise, in which Johansson played Black Widow, has risen to the top of the highest-budget chart alongside James Cameron’s efforts and the Star Wars franchise. Cleopatra was a catastrophic flop, but Johansson’s forays into cinematic extravagance have gone down much more favourably. Her films have grossed a combined $15.4 billion worldwide, making her the highest-grossing female actor of all time.
Despite the many parallels between her career and Taylor’s, however, Johansson has her heart set on a different Golden Age actor’s trajectory. In a 2012 interview with The Huffington Post, the Lost in Translation star revealed that she has always hoped to someday play an iconic role portrayed by the late great Gloria Swanson.
“I want eventually to be Norma Desmond,” she said. “That is my goal.”
No portrayal of movie stardom on screen has had quite the impact on Swanson’s character in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. The 1950 film noir stars William Holden as a screenwriter who becomes involved with the ageing, reclusive film star Norma Desmond (Swanson), who wants his help to make her big screen comeback. It’s a dark, cautionary tale about Hollywood, the perfect encapsulation of the rot at the centre of the studio system just as it was falling apart.
As Norma, Swanson was channelling herself. Much of the backstory of her character was drawn from Swanson’s own career – her stratospheric stardom in the silent era, her famous taste for extravagance, and her downfall upon the introduction of sound.
This is further reflected in a scene in which Norma shows Holden’s character a film that she starred in during her youth, which was Swanson’s movie Queen Kelly. Erich von Stroheim, who directed Queen Kelly, plays Norma’s butler and former director and spouse in Sunset Blvd., further blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
Swanson was 51 when she played the character, but given how youthful stars continue to look these days, it’s reasonable to assume that Johansson will have to wait until her seventies to portray a Norma Desmond-like character. Still, it’s easy to see how she might tap into her past as Hollywood’s pre-eminent bombshell of the 2010s to inform the character. It is much harder to imagine a filmmaker who could match Wilder’s writing and directing.
