“Naked, but not too sexy”: Scarlett Johansson’s non-negotiable demand for her only nude scene
The debate continues to rage on whether nudity has a place in modern cinema, and the two schools of thought can each state a compelling case. For almost her entire career, Scarlett Johansson has refused to bare all for the cameras, but she was willing to make an exception if her demand was met.
Any conversation about onscreen nudity usually boils down to how it’s depicted. If it’s in service of the characters and the story, and it’s portrayed in a way that isn’t leering, overly salacious, or in questionable taste, then it can often enhance a certain scene, storyline, or subplot.
However, at the opposite end of the equation, it goes without saying that it can frequently come across as gratuitous, unnecessary, and shoehorned in to appeal to a certain section of the audience, existing for no other rhyme or reason than to stir up some publicity and try to steam up the biggest screen possible.
The latter sentiment doesn’t apply to Johansson, though, who agreed to perform her first nude scene for strictly artistic reasons. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, audiences aren’t supposed to find her mysterious, unnamed protagonist alluring; they’re supposed to find her cold, calculating, and unsettling.
Obviously, a lot of that is down to the fact that she’s a visitor from another planet, and her alien isn’t interested in much else other than seducing lonely men and luring them to their demise, posing as an object of desire to prey on her victims and reduce them to a pile of empty skin and miscellaneous goo.
Johansson has spoken frequently of the issues she faced being objectified, sexualised, and reduced to an object of desire in the years following her initial breakthrough two decades ago, and while many people within the industry have no doubt tried to convince her to perform more nude scenes, Under the Skin remains the exception.
“I was completely naked in that movie,” the two-time Academy Award nominee accurately surmised, before explaining why she’d agreed to do it and how she wanted it portrayed. “She was a totally different species, so her nudity was kind of practical. I also had black hair. That was my idea: I didn’t think she should be a blonde sort of bombshell.”
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When discussing the scene with Glazer, the star didn’t want it to be remotely alluring or titillating, instead making it perfectly clear that it needed to feel organic to the character and the way she was playing it throughout the story. Or, as Johansson neatly summed it up: “Naked, but not too sexy.”
It’s certainly that, with Under the Skin presenting its extra-terrestrial anchor as fully in the buff, but not in a manner designed to be provocative or sexually suggestive. For Johansson, it was merely a character on the search for their next victim, with objectification never on her or Glazer’s minds for a second.
