Johansson admits she courts controversy
In a new interview, Scarlett Johansson acknowledges she has courted controversy, mostly by the impolitic way she has defended her choices to star in movies that were criticized for their depictions of people who have long been marginalized by Hollywood.
“Yeah, I’ve made a career out of (controversy),” the “Black Widow” star said in an interview with the U.K. publication The Gentlewoman. Johansson, 36, also remains one of the few remaining stars to continue to support Woody Allen.
Johansson said she’s going to express her opinions, “because that’s who I am.” She also admitted she hasn’t always expressed herself in the best way possible.
“I mean, everyone has a hard time admitting when they’re wrong about stuff, and for all of that to come out publicly, it can be embarrassing,” Johansson told The Gentlewoman. “To have the experience of, ‘Wow, I was really off mark there, or I wasn’t looking at the big picture, or I was inconsiderate.’ I’m also a person.”
Johansson became one of the more prominent examples of Hollywood’s long history of whitewashing with her leading role in “Ghost in the Shell.” In the 2017 action film, based on a Japanese manga, she played a Major, a machinate body housing the brain of a dead Japanese woman. Fans of the original manga and advocates for Asian actors in Hollywood argued that a Japanese actress should have been cast in the role.
Johansson tried to defend playing Major by essentially saying her character was race-less. “I would never attempt to play a person of a different race, obviously,” Johansson said. The film ended up bombing at the box office, pulling in only $20 million its first weekend on a $110 million budget.
In 2018 she faced criticism from the LGBTQ community for being cast in “Rub and Tug,” playing a real-life trans man who ran an empire of massage parlors in Pittsburgh in the 1970s.
Johansson responded to the criticism in a way that came off as arrogant. She also sounded ignorant of the way in which audiences had begun to lose their taste for even acclaimed cisgender actors, such as Oscar winner Jared Leto, Emmy winner Jeffrey Tambor and Oscar nominee Felicity Huffman, playing transgender women in “Dallas Buyers Club,” Transparent” and “Transamerica,” respectively.