Scarlett Johansson Says She Was Offered ‘Male Gaze’ Roles Early in Her Career

Scarlett Johansson has seen roles for women in Hollywood improve since she started her career — but she remembers a time when things weren’t so rosy.

“You know, it’s a different time for young women,” Johansson, 40, told The Times of London in a recent interview. “The messaging is different — there are many more role models, women are visible in powerful positions and the opportunities I have had to play women who don’t have to just be one thing or another have increased.”

The Marvel star went on to say that many of the scripts she read early in her career were not so well-rounded.

“When I was younger, a lot of the roles I was offered, or I went for, had their ambitions or character arcs revolving around their own desirability, or the male gaze, or a male-centred story,” she explained. “That is less frequent, though — something has shifted.”

Eventually, she began to find movies that weren’t so focused on her sex appeal, but the process didn’t happen instantly.

“I just waited,” she said. “I had to become comfortable with the idea that it could take some time. Which is hard when you’re a young actor, but at that time I didn’t have any children.”

Johansson has since welcomed daughter Rose, 10, with ex-husband Romain Dauriac and son Cosmo, 3, with husband Colin Jost. She recently said she would let Rose see her in Jurassic World Rebirth — even though she’s heard it’s the scariest entry in the Jurassic Park franchise.

“It’s still appropriate for the family,” she told E! News at the film’s premiere in June. “You just gotta watch it through the crack in your fingers.”

Johansson’s Times of London interview isn’t the first time she’s opened up about feeling stereotyped for her looks. In 2022, she said she felt like she was “kind of being groomed” to be a “bombshell-type actor” after appearing in Lost in Translation and Girl With a Pearl Earring before she was 20.

“I was coming into my own womanhood and learning my own desirability and sexuality,” she explained during an interview on the “Table for Two With Bruce Bozzi” podcast. “I was playing the other woman and the object of desire and I suddenly found myself cornered in this place. I couldn’t get out of it.”

That same year, Johansson — who has earned two Oscar nominations — said she once felt like her career was over because she felt so “hypersexualized” by her early roles.

“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 said on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast in October 2022. “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.”