Scarlett Johansson has packed a whole career into 26 years: indie hits, action blockbusters, Broadway triumph, Woody Allen muse-dom. Now she wants her obituary written? As Johansson stars this month opposite Matt Damon in Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo, having just wrapped next summer’s The Avengers, Peter Biskind gets her talking about the thrill of winning a Tony, the emptiness that followed—along with her divorce from Ryan Reynolds—and the new challenges ahead.
Scarlett Johansson has a much-anticipated film coming out in December called We Bought a Zoo, from the gifted writer-director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) and co-starring the actor everyone loves to love, Matt Damon (credit superfluous). She has also just wrapped The Avengers, one of next summer’s big comic-book movies, in which she reprises her role from Iron Man 2 as the Black Widow. Hence she’s now doing publicity, but she is bored by the ritual dance between stars and the press—stale questions, staler answers—so she likes to mix it up. Several years ago, she took a journalist with her while she shopped. She agreed to go with another to Hollywood’s Erotic Museum, to see a dildo show, although she eventually changed her mind and dragged him to the wax museum next door. For me she suggested the Brooklyn Bridge—walking across it. Not my idea of fun. So here we were at New York’s Carlyle Hotel for an old-fashioned breakfast. Or at least here I was; she was half an hour late, giving me plenty of time to check out the foreign tourists taking advantage of the ridiculously asymmetrical exchange rate to stuff themselves with overpriced pastries.
Eventually, Johansson arrived, unapologetically explaining that her beloved Chihuahua, Maggie, perturbed by an unsettled stomach, had let loose all over the floor of her apartment just as she was getting ready to leave. It was her update of “the dog ate my homework.” But it was hard to hold this against her. I knew from doing my own homework that she’s celebrated for her frankness and wit, and before too much time had passed I understood why.
Flaunting red hair and dressed demurely in a gray sweater and a long vintage skirt with a floral pattern, she looked positively prim, belying her reputation for what Woody Allen once called her “zaftig humidity.” Those lips and that voice that have launched a thousand adjectives were there as advertised. Yes, her lips are “pouty,” “bee-stung,” “crushed-rose,” “kissable,” as they have been variously described, and, yes, her voice sounds “husky,” “honey-dripping,” “sultry,” “throaty,” “smoky,” like “slowly ripped velvet.” But it’s her droll sense of humor that sets her apart. As a conversationalist, she skillfully walks the thin line between being entertainingly irreverent and committing the sort of verbal gaffes that might make it impossible even for her to eat lunch in that town again.
Johansson uneasily scanned the room for diners covertly taking her picture while pretending to chat on their iPhones, then said, “They’re everywhere.” What puzzled me was the opposite: no diners were taking her picture and there weren’t any paparazzi, not in the restaurant, not at the entrance to the hotel. Had they all lost interest? Was her career over, at 26? “Nobody in this dining room is giving you the time of day,” I said, pointing out the obvious.
“Well, if you’re paying $35 for eggs, you’d better be focused on them.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re doing their work for them,” I responded, alluding to the two nude pictures of her that had recently gone viral. She confessed she had taken them herself with her smartphone. “Those are old, from three years ago. They were sent to my husband,” she explained, referring to her now ex, Ryan Reynolds. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like I was shooting a porno—although there’s nothing wrong with that either.” Still, a dangerous habit, I thought, for a movie star. Worse than getting her phone hacked, she might make herself look bad: “You’re hardly a professional photographer.”
“I know my best angles,” she replied breezily. Cool, too, and smart was Johansson’s response after she found out she had been hacked: she copyrighted the pictures so that she could go after sites that displayed them. Good or bad, they’ve all but disappeared, and the alleged hacker was arrested in fairly short order.
Johansson, who grew up in Greenwich Village, is famous for her precocity. Of Jewish and Scandinavian descent (she thinks Jewish and looks Danish), she was only eight, in 1992, when she first appeared onstage, Off Broadway, in Sophistry, a play that featured Ethan Hawke. She was 9 when she appeared in her first movie, Rob Reiner’s North, and 12 when she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for an outstanding performance as a pre-teen runaway in Manny & Lo. Guided by her mother (her parents split up when she was 13), she skillfully navigated the shoals of child acting, and aside from occasional lapses—Home Alone 3, Eight Legged Freaks—laid the foundation for her soon-to-be brilliant career. While still a pre-teen she found herself being directed by Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer. She followed up with a quartet of exceptional indie films: The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ghost World, Lost in Translation, and Girl with a Pearl Earring. It was her role in Lost in Translation, as a sullen newlywed marooned in Tokyo, that really put her on the map, not to mention the now famous opening shot of her fanny clad only in see-through panties—an intimacy she uncharacteristically resisted, at least at first.
In 2004, at 19, she fell in with Woody Allen, joining the Who’s Who of distinguished actresses—Diane Keaton, Judy Davis, Dianne Wiest, Maureen Stapleton, et al.—who have appeared in his films, a singular honor for one so young. Admittedly, she was a last-minute replacement for Kate Winslet in Match Point, but Johansson-Allen turned out to be a fortuitous pairing, eventually producing Scoop as well, which he wrote for her, and then Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “The first time I met Woody was at the camera test for Match Point,” she told me. She already had the part and was “parading around in all of these costumes, and Woody was standing there and he’d look and go, ‘O.K. Thank you. Turn around. Next.’ I felt like I was doing catalogue work or something. He flicks you away. You have to poke him a bit. So began a friendship.”
Like many people in the public eye who have to look after their looks and health, Johansson and Allen are both hypochondriacs; they bonded over Purell. “He shakes a lot of hands,” Johansson explained. “I’ll squirt some in my hand and then squirt in his. It’s like a drug but not as much fun.” Warming to the subject, she continued: “You don’t want to get stuck behind me if you have to get in to see your E.N.T.”
“E.N.T.?”
“Ear-nose-and-throat doctor. I’ll be in with those people for hours.” As it turns out, she’s not only conversant with the lingo but a skilled diagnostician. “The only reason why Woody and I are still friends is because I’ve diagnosed all kinds of his skin tags, lesions, ailments. I’ve prescribed things for Woody that he’s then asked his doctor to prescribe for him. I would have loved to have gone into diagnostic medicine.”
But friendships cannot live by Purell alone. Her most recent film with Allen, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, was released in 2008. Is the collaboration played out? Allen told me it isn’t: “I have every intention of working with her again, but I just didn’t think it was a great idea for either one of us to work together too intensely, picture after picture. I didn’t want her to be burdened by, ‘Oh, she’s in all the Woody Allen pictures, it’s so predictable,’ and she’s my new muse, and all that silliness. But now that some time has elapsed since Vicky Cristina, I will start to think about that again.” For her part, Johansson said, “I don’t think anything’s played out. I’m waiting for him to write my Citizen Kane.”
Continued Allen, “I always feel I’m going to wind up as Erich von Stroheim to her Norma Desmond, as her chauffeur, writing her imaginary fan letters so her ego doesn’t get deflated. I’ll say I directed her in pictures when she was this international goddess, and now I’m just happy to be able to drive her car.”
Not only is Johansson the darling of journalists and directors, she’s also coveted by purveyors of luxury goods. At one time or another she has lent her name to Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, Moët & Chandon, Calvin Klein, L’Oréal, and Reebok. It used to be the case that actors were shy about endorsing products; they worried about overexposure, cheapening their images, and even—how quaint this now seems—selling out. (Witness the darkly comic scene in Lost in Translation in which Johansson’s co-star, Bill Murray, playing an aging American movie star, runs through multiple takes of a Japanese commercial for Suntory Whisky.)