‘Black Widow’ felt like an affair to Johansson
Secrecy of Marvel project didn’t come naturally for superstar actress
LOS ANGELES— Natasha Romanoff is heading into the holidays with one less secret to keep.
Scarlett Johansson, fresh off wrapping her “Black Widow” standalone film, acknowledges that not talking about the highly anticipated movie, especially over the past year, took a toll.
“I’m not a guarded, secretive person by nature anyway,” the jet-lagged star tells USA Today, having recently flown back to the States from the monthslong shoot in London.
So when journalists and fans probed for details about the “Black Widow” film, which Disney had yet to confirm, the actress found herself experiencing “a strange phenomenon of feeling kind of guilty … like you’re doing something wrong — I felt like I was having an affair or something and everyone suspected it,” she laughs.
The cat was finally out of the bag at San Diego Comic-Con in July, when Johansson joined director Cat e Shortlan d (“Lore”) and revealed “Black Widow” will hit theatres May 1, kicking off Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though Natasha famously found her end during “Avengers: Endgame,” the solo film, which also stars Rachel Weisz and David Harbour, will be set after the events of 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War.”
After eight years of hashing out a “Black Widow” film with Marvel, Johansson says the experience “was more than I ever could have hoped for.”
“The film deals with real, complicated stuff,” she says, calling her Black Widow “a character that has a lot of shame. And maybe in some weird, roundabout way, maybe some of the feelings I had going into this were actually some of her unprocessed feelings that I got to work through while making this film. “She’s a woman whose narrative has been created for her in a lot of ways and the path that has been laid before her is not one that she’s necessarily paved herself.”
Johansson is no stranger to the feeling.
“I have felt that way at times in my life and in my career. I think every woman has struggled with what is expected of them,” she says. At Comic-Con, Marvel showed a “Black Widow” trailer to the crowd that offered a glimpse at the ballet company/ Black Widow program that trained Russian girls to be super-assassins, along with a “John Wick”-esque fight between Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff and her “sister” Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) that involved guns, knives and a shower curtain, plus a throwdown between Natasha and debuting supervillain Taskmaster.