Acting and motherhood are a real Marvel for Johansson
ThOr directed scarlett Johansson to her latest role. that’s thor as in Chris hemsworth, her good friend and co-star in the star-studded Avengers film franchise in which she plays the superhero black Widow.
A couple of years ago, Chris had just starred in thor: ragnarok, directed by up-and-coming New Zealander taika Waititi, who had given Chris the script for a very different sort of film he was writing called Jojo rabbit.
When Chris and scarlett met on the set of the next Avengers movie, infinity War, he urged her to give it a read.
‘i don’t think it was even about me having a part in it,’ says scarlett when we meet in Los Angeles. ‘he was just telling me he’d read this incredible script and kept saying: “You have to read it, it’s like nothing i’ve ever read.” ’
Jojo rabbit is a pitch-black comedy set in Nazi Germany towards the end of World War ii featuring slapstick turns from the hitler Youth Movement, a group of comic Gestapo officers and a ten-year-old boy whose imaginary best friend is Adolf hitler. Difficult to describe, let alone defend.
but set against this unlikely background is a simple and tender tale. rosie (Johansson) is a single mother struggling to raise her son Jojo (12-year-old british actor roman Griffin Davis) without anti-semitic prejudice in an environment that is rife with it.
When Jojo, who’s been brainwashed into Nazi anti-semitism, discovers a Jewish girl named rosie is hiding in the attic, he’s forced to open his heart to those he had dismissed as the enemy.
‘the script was this perfect gem,’ says scarlett, 35. ‘i’ve read enough of them to know when something comes across, and this was so beautiful, whimsical and childlike — a bit like taika, really
— and also very poignant and hearted breaking. i wanted to be part of it from the beginning.’
‘it’s not for everyone, of course,’ says scarlett who, like Waititi, is partly Jewish. ‘but i think it’s a message that’s important for everyone to hear. i’ve experienced anti-Semitism in my life — i think every Jewish person has. it’s alive, probably now more than ever, and there’s a lot of fear out there.
‘but that’s why I think the studio who put this out, fox Searchlight, were so brave, because they were saying: “It’s OK to laugh at this
‘humour can be a way to deliver a very powerful message by saying: “OK, now that i’ve got your attention, here’s what i really want to say.”’
Jojo is a far cry from the Marvel comic franchise, though Scarlett likes making the superhero movies. ‘Everybody talks about this idea that you do one film for commercial cinema and one for youre self, but i don’t see it like that because the Marvel stuff is really fulfilling. I feel like all the work I do is for my own fulfillment, whether it’s big or small, whether people go to see it or not.’
born and brought up in Manhattan,
the daughter of a Danish-born architect father and a Bronx-Jewish film producer mother, Scarlett first appeared on film before she was ten, and says that even before that she and her elder sister Vanessa were putting on performances at home.
‘We were the singing and dancing team,’ she smiles. ‘We did all the parts in Beauty And The Beast. My sister was Belle and I was the townspeople because that’s more my thing. I went to Lee Strasberg [the method acting school] when I was a kid, I took musical theatre and tap dance and all that.’
ScArLETT was nine when she got her first professional role, a small part in the children’s adventure film North, and just 11 when she had her first starring part as the younger sister of a pregnant teenager in the 1996 comedy drama Manny & Lo.
At 13, she hit the big time as tortured teen Grace in robert redford’s drama The Horse Whisperer before establishing herself as a grown-up actress playing Bill Murray’s unlikely love interest in Lost In Translation.
Scarlett tends to be drawn to people who started working early in their own professions. ‘I have friends who are classical musicians, dancers and gymnasts, and we all share a similar experience in that we were professional children. That meant it was very clear to us what we loved to do, and we all felt like we were pursuing an art that was in our soul, in our bones. I think we still do.
Scarlett’s partner is colin Jost, a comic, actor and head writer on New York’s legendary satire show Saturday Night Live, and they have been together almost three years. ‘There’s a lot of laughter in our home right now,’ says Scarlett, though she cannot deny it has been a rocky path to stability. Her first brief marriage to actor ryan reynolds lasted from 2008 to 2010 — ‘I was 23,’ she has since commented, ‘I didn’t really have an understanding of marriage. Maybe I kind of romanticised it.’ In 2012, she started dating Frenchborn advertising executive romain Dauriac, with whom she had a daughter rose, now five; the two married in 2014 but separated two years later, and were finally divorced in 2017. While in the process of getting a divorce, Noah Baumbach asked her to star in his new film Marriage Story, which is about . . . divorce. Life imitating art? ‘Hmm,’ she pauses. ‘I don’t necessarily think you have to have lived the experience of the character you’re playing, but there’s obviously stuff in there. For me, more than being a divorcee, was the fact I was a parent and was now having the experience of co-parenting.’
She says that, as co-parents go, she and romain are doing pretty well. ‘We do as good as we can. I’d never experienced anything like it before so there was no rule book, but if you have respect for the other person, then that’s important. You each need to respect the other as a co-parent, and I think we try to act from that space.’
One thing motherhood has taught her, she says, is that she can’t control what happens in her life. ‘You can’t anticipate anything with kids, and it’s an incredible life lesson where sometimes you just have to sit in the moment and be there and that’s it.
‘You just have to be present with whatever is happening. Just being able to let go of control makes me feel more in control, because now I’ve accepted that everything is out of control, I know there’s nothing I can do about it. And that’s a very interesting place to be.’
JOJO Rabbit is in cinemas on January 3. Marriage Story is available on Netflix.