Johansson, pictured here at the age of 16 in 2001, says she feels that with her early film roles, she was set up to appear older than she actually was and that was a threat to 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,” she told Dax Shepard in a new episode of his podcast Armchair Expert.
“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.”
The Avengers star, who is married to Saturday Night Live star and comedian Colin Jost and has two children, was notably cast opposite Bill Murray in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). At the time she was 17 and played a character five years her senior.
“Because I think everybody thought I was older and that I’d been [acting] for a long time, I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hypersexualised thing. I felt like [my career] was over,” Johansson said.
“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?'”
Johansson said the “runway” for a career like such is “not long” and “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,” she said.
Johansson, however, said she feels the film landscape has evolved for young women and now, women-identifying characters are written with more nuance instead of being sidelined as beautiful counterparts, a change she explained for her was a welcome one.
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