The scene Scarlett Johansson called the “most disgusting, awful thing” she’d ever done
Even the most successful actors in the industry have to start somewhere, and for Scarlett Johansson, a few early movies in her career aren’t exactly showstoppers.
After making her film debut at the age of ten in Rob Reiner’s North, Johansson did find herself in a few successful movies, and although we can’t ignore the duds, like Home Alone 3 and the kids’ fantasy comedy My Brother the Pig, these were certainly some infantile mistakes, but she wasn’t yet an adult, so can you really blame her?
By the time she was in her late teens, Johansson started to pick up some better roles, collaborating with the Coens on The Man Who Wasn’t There, appearing in the coming-of-age classic Ghost World, and leading the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation opposite Bill Murray.
Yet, in between these movies was a film that certainly raised eyebrows, clearly reflecting the actor’s lack of complete confidence in her career choices, because she was still only young, and if she’d known any better, perhaps she wouldn’t have chosen to star in a movie about giant killer arachnids.
She starred in Eight Legged Freaks in 2002, a pretty conventional take on the monster genre, with spiders turning into humongous creatures once exposed to toxic waste and subsequently wreaking havoc on a local town. With God-awful early 2000s special effects, it’s a wonder how the movie recruited various stars, like David Arquette, into the production.
Johansson certainly doesn’t see it as one of her finest pieces of work, and she even cites one of the scenes as one of the worst she has ever had to shoot. There are a lot of gross things that an actor might have to be put through to film a movie, whether that be holding revolting amounts of fake sick in their mouths or being covered in strikingly realistic and gruesome wounds, and for Johansson, the worst thing she has ever experienced on set came during the filming of Eight Legged Freaks.
“Being covered with that goo was the most disgusting, awful thing I’ve ever done in a film. It was cold and slimy and wet,” the actor told Cinema.
The movie, directed by Ellory Elkayem, didn’t exactly perform all that well, and you’d think that it would’ve had career-ending potential for Johansson, but luckily, she was able to leave it behind her, slimy goo and all.
Following Eight Legged Freaks with Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and then the Oscar-nominated Girl with a Pearl Earring, it seems like the monster movie was the last silly movie of Johansson’s career, and since then, she has taken on much more impressive parts, whether that be as a seductive alien in Under the Skin or a troubled wife in Marriage Story.
Perhaps the experience of getting covered in slime was just too much for the actor to stomach, leading her to ditch these childish roles and dedicate herself to much more high-brow pieces of cinema, but that’s until she decided to give herself to the world of Marvel, anyway.
