Scarlett Johansson has said she was groomed by her former management team into taking on her famously sultry and provocative roles.
The actress, 38, said at the start of her acting career she was only put forward to play characters who were “bombshells”.
“I kind of became, like, an ingénue,” said the Black Widow star on iHeartRadio’s Table for Two podcast.
“Young girls like that are really objectified, and that’s just a fact, so I think whatever box they’re put into, it sort of sets you on this trajectory for how your life will go.
“I think because of that trajectory that I had been sort of launched towards, I really got stuck in this.”
The star continued: “I was kind of being groomed in a way to be this what you call this bombshell type of actor. I was playing the other woman and this object of desire.
“I suddenly found myself cornered in this place, like, I couldn’t get out of it.”
Johansson said around the time she was in her late teens, she began to explore her own “desirability and sexuality”, which only added to her being typecast.
She also quickly realised that doing roles centred around her appearance would mean a short-lived career.
“I think for that kind of bombshell [role] that burns bright and quick, and then you don’t have much opportunity beyond that, and I just felt like I was burning out so quickly,” she said.
The twice Oscar-nominated star was 19 when she starred as the older, sophisticated, and sexy Nola Rice in the blacklisted director Woody Allen’s psychological thriller Match Point.
In his 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, the 87-year-old wrote of Johansson that “not only was she gifted and beautiful, but sexually she was radioactive”.
Just two months ago the actress, who is now married to SNL comedian Colin Jost with whom she shares two young children, complained about how “hypersexualised” she was presented in her early career.
She added on Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert: “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’.”
