Speaking during a podcast with Dax Shepard titled Armchair Expert, Scarlett Johansson, 37, said that she came to fame in her teenage years.
She says that she felt that even then she knew the way she was treated was not right.
“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 also said that it was as if she kept playing the same roles again and again making her feel like her career would soon be at a dead end.
“Because I think everbody 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. 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… I attributed a lot of that to the fact that people thought I was much, much older than I was.”
The actress said that things have changed now compared to when she first started acting.
“Now I see younger actors that are in their 20s. It feels like they’re allowed to be all these different things. It’s another time, too. We’re not even allowed to really pigeonhole other actors anymore, thankfully right? People are much more dynamic.”
She does however say that it is still a patriarchal society and there is a long way to go.
“We live in a patriarchy and I feel like there’s a fundamental reality of the woman’s condition that will always, even if those 600 men are not actively aggressive necessarily as much as they would have been a minute ago, it’s still fundamentally there. It’s so baked into our culture and society. It’s hard for me to imagine that ever being not an element.”
Johansson said she feels that being in her 30’s means she is caught between two generations when dealing with the patriarchy in the entertainment industry.
The progress is “two steps forward and two steps back.”
“I think if you don’t leave room for people to figure it out, then the actual progressive change doesn’t really happen.”
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