Scarlett Johansson names the hardest role of her career: “It’s an interesting challenge”
No one ever said acting was going to be easy. Even the biggest Hollywood stars in the business have found themselves struggling against roles that prove to be a sizable challenge, testing the limits of their abilities and, quite frankly, putting them through the wringer.
Scarlett Johansson once identified a certain role as the most difficult of her career, but it was one that didn’t even require her to show her face. You’d think that not having to put on any crazy special effects makeup or actually using your body would be easier, but it was the reliance on only her voice that the actor actually found to be the biggest mountain she’d ever had to climb.
Having started her career as a child, Johansson has done everything from period dramas and romantic comedies to superhero films and intense dramas, leaving few stones unturned. While she has even taken on a few voice roles for animated kids movies over the years, like playing Princess Mindy in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and, more recently, starring in the musical Sing series, it was not a children’s voice role that she marked out as her most challenging. It was Her.
The role was a full-circle moment, in a way, because Johansson had starred as the lead in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation a decade before, which explored the director’s relationship breakdown with Spike Jonze. – Her was Jonze’s own interpretation of the break-up, so it was only fitting that he used the same actor, but that wasn’t why he claimed to have picked Johansson… in fact, he’d initially cast Samantha Morton in the role of the Siri-like lover who Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls for.
Morton had delivered all of the character’s lines and been on set for the whole duration of shooting – as far as she was aware, she was a major part of the film. But once it came to post-production, Jonze had a change of heart. He wasn’t convinced that Morton’s voice was right after all, so he replaced her with Johansson despite all of her hard work.
Talking to Hitfix, Jonze explained, “Samantha was really involved in giving Joaquin a lot to work from. And then when we got into editing, we realised that what Samantha and I had done together wasn’t working for what the character needed, and so we ended up having to recast at that point in time.”
So, with Johansson now cast as the AI assistant Samantha, the actor had to step into a role that had already been performed, only this time she had to bring something more, perhaps something more sultry and playful. Appearing on the show You Quiz On the Block, she explained, “It was one of the hardest films that we made because it was complicated.”
Filming proved to be a challenge because it was such an unusual way of working. “Sometimes I would record with [Joaquin Phoenix], sometimes I would record to the movie and do his performance… I would record to the movie.”
Having to rely on simply using her voice was difficult, too. “It’s interesting because as an actor, you have your voice, obviously, and you have your body. Those are the two tools you have to perform, and when you take one of those tools away, obviously, you don’t have your physicality; it’s an interesting kind of challenge.”
Her was a hit, though, and Johansson was captivating as Samantha, bringing a well-needed humanity to this artificial voice – it’s a concept that could’ve fallen flat, but in capable hands, Her became one of the 2010s’ most beloved and poignant movies.
