Disney movie megastar Scarlett Johansson said she felt “groomed” and driven to recreate herself as a “bombshell” actress during the opening years of her career.
“I did ‘Lost in Translation’ and ‘Girl With the Pearl Earring,’ and by that point, I was 18, 19 and I was coming into my own womanhood and learning my own desirability and sexuality,” Johansson said on the Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi podcast. “I was kind of being groomed, in a way, to be this what you call a bombshell-type actor.”
The Oscar nominee continued, “It would be easy probably to sit across from someone in that situation and go, ‘This is working’ … But for that kind of bombshell, you know, that burns bright and quick and then it’s done and you don’t have opportunity beyond that … It just was an interesting, weird conundrum to be in but it really came back to working at it and trying to carve a place in different projects and work in great ensembles.”
File/Scarlett Johansson attends the 26th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at The Shrine Auditorium on January 19, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images)
“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 continued, Variety reported. “I think everybody thought I was older … I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hyper-sexualized thing.”
“I felt like [my career] was over,” she lamented.
Johansson — who has an estimated net worth of $165 million and topped the Forbes list of highest-paid actresses in 2019 — complained previously that women are underpaid in Hollywood, adding she is “still fighting that damn fight” to get paid what she claims she is worth.
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— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 10, 2021
The hyper-sexualization of performers as they climb the Hollywood ladder of stardom is not a fresh accusation.
As Breitbart News reported, Netflix series Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown, 18, blasted Hollywood earlier this year for overly sexualizing young girls and called social media the “worst place of all time.”
The teen star was cast at 12 for the popular Netflix series Stranger Things, which quickly catapulted her to stardom. But as she said on The Guilty Feminist podcast it was difficult growing up under Hollywood’s spotlight.
Calling it “gross,” Brown said the way she is treated by the industry and the media “can be really overwhelming.”
Actor Cole Sprouse is also on the record saying female Disney Channel stars were “heavily sexualized” by the network when he was growing up in the industry as a child actor.
File/Cole Sprouse attends the 2019 Variety Power of Young Hollywood event at h club LA on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019, in Los Angeles. He has previously declared female Disney Channel stars were “heavily sexualized” by the network (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)
As a child actor, Cole Sprouse — along with his twin brother Dylan — has starred in various projects in the late-1990s and early-2000s, including Big Daddy (alongside actor Adam Sandler), Friends (as Ross’ son), and the Disney Channel hit series, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.
“My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, ‘Oh, you made it out! Oh, you’re unscathed!’ No. The young women on the channel we were on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that there’s absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences,” Sprouse told the New York Times.
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