Scarlett Johansson talks about being “hyper*ualized” and “piggybacked” at the start of her Hollywood acting career: ‘It was scary at that time’

On the 500th episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, popular actress Scarlett Johansson opened up about her struggles at the start of her acting career in Hollywood. The actress, who started acting at a young age, said that she felt her career would finish early on because she was “hypersexualized” by the industry at the start of her career.

“I kind of became objectified and pigeonholed in this way where I felt like I wasn’t getting offers for work for things that I wanted to do. I remember thinking to myself, ‘I think people think I’m 40 years old.’ It somehow stopped being something that was desirable and something that I was fighting against.”

She continued, “Because I think everybody thought I was older and that I had been (acting) for a long time. I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hypersexualized thing. I felt like (my career) was over. It was like, ‘That’s the kind of career you have, these are the roles you’ve played.’ And I was like, ‘This is it? The runway is not long on that. So, it was scary at that time. In a weird way, I was like, ‘Is this it?’ I attributed a lot of that to the fact that people thought I was much, much older than I was.”

Johansson further spoke about how things have changed over the past few years. “Now, I see younger actors that are in their 20s. It feels like they’re allowed to be all these different things,” she explained. “It’s another time, too. We’re not even allowed to really pigeonhole other actors anymore, thankfully, right? People are much more dynamic,” she said.

Johansson was last seen on the screen in the 2021 film Black Widow. She next headlines Asteroid City, followed by My Mother’s Wedding opposite Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham.

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