Scarlett Johansson is speaking out about being typecast as a “sex object” after her role in 2003's Lost in Translation.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Johansson looked back on her early success with Sofia Coppola’s film and the way she was pigeonholed by the offers she received after its release.
“After Lost in Translation, every role that I was offered for years was ‘the girlfriend,’ ‘the other woman,’ a sex object—I couldn’t get out of the cycle,” Johansson told Vanity Fair’s David Canfield. “It sort of felt like, ‘Oh, I guess this is my identity now as an actor.’ There wasn’t much I could do with that.”
She noted that her representatives didn’t help her avoid those kinds of offers while acknowledging they were simply, “reacting to the norm.”
“The industry worked like that forever,” she added.
But as she came into her own style and identity, she became aware of what was going on around her.
"You suddenly turn around and you’re like, ‘Wait, I feel like I’m being’—I don’t want to say exploited because it’s such a severe word,” Johansson said. “That term is so heavy, but yeah, it was a kind of an exploitation.”
Lost in Translation featured Bill Murray as an aging director experiencing a midlife crisis while in Tokyo, where he forms an unlikely bond with Johansson’s character, a recent college graduate.
At the time of filming, Johansson was 17, and Murray was 52.
On the subject of her co-star, Johansson didn’t go into details but offered, “Bill was in a hard place. Everybody was on tenterhooks around him, including our director and the full crew, because he was dealing with his… stuff.”
But Johansson noted that when she ran into Murray again earlier this year backstage at SNL50, she ran into a "different person."
“I think life has humbled him,” she said, before Canfield pointed to the allegations made against Murray on the set of Being Mortal, where he was accused of inappropriate behavior towards a female crew member.
“Certainly, yes—that was really bad,” Johansson responded. “But I also know COVID was a hard thing for him. Life—all these things have led up to him being held accountable for that kind of behavior. But you know what? How wonderful that people can change.”