After avenging herself on Disney and OpenAI, Scarlett Johansson stars in a summer rom-com revolving around the race to the moon.
On the final show of the Saturday Night Live season, Colin Jost and Michael Che do a joke swap on Weekend Update, writing embarrassing gags for each other to read.
Since Jost married Scarlett Johansson, in 2020, Che has delighted in tormenting his partner by giving him racy jokes to read about his movie-star wife.
In May, Jost laughed and hung his head sheepishly as he read his joke: “ChatGPT has released a new voice-assistant feature inspired by Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in Her. Which I have never bothered to watch because, without that body, what’s the point of listening?”
And what does that body think about that joke?
“I think I blacked out during it,” Johansson said, with her larky laugh. “I certainly don’t get mad. I definitely am terrified that I’m going to have to go into hiding now, get a bunch of hate mail. Yet somehow, immediately afterward, I can have a beer with Che.”
The actress, 39, was curled up on a couch at the Whitby Hotel in midtown Manhattan, her bare feet tucked under her. She was glowing in day sequins in a saucy black Rodarte dress, her black Balmain mules dropped on the floor. On her wrist is tattooed a bracelet with Thor’s hammer, a nod to her father’s Danish roots, with a small “I (HEART) NY” embedded in it. She is in the process of removing a different tattoo on her arm, a sunrise.
Those who know Johansson talk about her air of calm, her generosity, her un-diva ways, and, as her husband calls it, her “fundamentally positive outlook.”
“She’s very good at envisioning what she wants from every phase of life and career,” Jost said.
At a time when everyone always seems one-half there, the other half absorbed by their fiendish little devices, Johansson is intensely present. She stays off social media; she doesn’t want to share her life with strangers, which gives her mystique in an overexposed world. Her large green eyes stay trained on me for nearly two hours, asking nearly as many questions as she fields.
She, too, is a comic star at SNL, having hosted six times and killed playing Ivanka Trump (introducing her perfume, Complicit) and Senator Katie Britt of Alabama (giving a bizarre, creepily flirty response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address).
“I’m crazy about her,” the usually laconic Lorne Michaels said. Michaels, who has seen neuroses and addictions galore over 49 seasons of SNL, loves the fact that Johansson is “brilliant” and “no fuss.”
“Duck to water,” he said. “She just has it. It’s just the sparkle in her eyes. She’s alive and you can kind of see it. She focuses and does the work and then, 10 minutes later, you’re talking about something else. She’s very warm as a person and very clear about what she believes in.”
Johansson is promoting her production company’s first film, Fly Me to the Moon, a summer romp about a fake moon landing and true love, co-starring Channing Tatum and Woody Harrelson and directed by Greg Berlanti.
In one scene, in which the con artist turned advertising whiz played by Johansson tries to woo lawmakers into appropriating more funds for Nasa, Jost pops up as a bespectacled senator; the comedian said his character was “some combination of Mitch McConnell and Foghorn Leghorn.” (Johansson joked to Jimmy Fallon that Jost had to do cameos in her films as part of their prenup.)
I asked Jost if he got jealous being on set while his wife was canoodling with Tatum.
“I think if I was, at this point, I’d be in trouble,” he said. “When Scarlett won the American Cinematheque Award, we were there and one of the things that night was a whole montage of kisses. I was like: ‘OK, there you go. I’m glad someone put it together in one package.’”
When I tell him she called their relationship “a delicate ecosystem,” he dryly shot back: “She was just filming Jurassic Park, so she’s thinking of everything in terms of delicate ecosystems.”
In a world with a paucity of movie stars, Johansson is a genuine twinklie, with an ambrosial voice harking to the 1940s, when all the top actresses had those great, distinctive voices.
“She’s like Carole Lombard — that very rare combination of glamorous, gorgeous, intelligence,” said Tom Rothman, the head of Sony Pictures’ film division. “That makes for a true movie star with a capital M and a capital S.” He said Sony was eager to put the movie, financed by Apple Original Films, on big screens across the country, hoping a zany romantic conspiracy comedy could lure moviegoers back to theatres this summer.
Berlanti recalled that when they were shooting the Nasa scenes at Cape Canaveral, engineers and movie crew members, men and women, would stop work to watch as Johansson sashayed onto the set in high heels and one of her colourful retro dresses.
“They’re literally building a rocket behind us,” Berlanti said. “It’s like, ‘Guys, there’s a rocket going off the other way.’ It’s very hard for someone to be at Nasa, where there are these giant structures around everybody, and still be the main attraction.”
“She’s in that first-name pantheon of actresses, Meryl and Julia and Scarlett,” he continued. “She’s been a star her entire adult life. She’s had success in every genre, from blockbusters to art-house films, and even voice-over work. And she hasn’t withered under the weight of the star system or the culture.”
Lost in Lost in Translation
Johansson got good reviews from the cast for her aptitude as a producer.
“Scarlett threw a Super Bowl party that was really sweet and really fun for the entire cast, and we all just got to go over to her house and just chill,” Tatum said. “She’s very, very good at bringing people together on sets.”
Anna Garcia, who plays Johansson’s assistant in the movie, recalled that on the first day of shooting, an actor with a minor part did not know his lines.
“How does this person not know his lines?” Garcia recalled thinking. “Scarlett was still so kind and worked to calm his nerves down.” Johansson ended up giving another actor one of the lines to lighten the load for the memory-challenged colleague.
Harrelson, who plays a shadowy Nixon operative who wants Johansson’s ad exec to help film a fake moon landing in case the real one goes wrong, said he was surprised as he got to know the actress.
“She’s a global superstar, and I just never detected even one trace of ego, just such a down-to-earth person,” he said. “She’s got a very Midwestern vibe, even though she was born in New York. I didn’t know if she’d be funny, but she really cracks me up.”
He said that the actress, who did not go to college after she was rejected by New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, made time to talk to his youngest daughter, Makani, about the importance of staying in school. She also showed up on the SNL set last year to give Harrelson his “Five Timers Club” jacket, commemorating his fifth turn as host.
Johansson was a child actor, starring with Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer. She shot to greater renown in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, which she filmed when she was 17. She played an insomniac, a young wife at loose ends in Tokyo, where her husband, a photographer, is on assignment. She hangs out with another insomniac, a movie star with marital troubles who’s in Japan filming a whiskey ad, played by Bill Murray. (“Make it Suntory time.”) The combo was charming.
“That movie was hard to make,” Johansson said. “It was far away. It was 26 days. We were shooting day for night, and night for day. I don’t know that we totally knew what it was. Sofia did. She saw what we were getting, but it wasn’t like everything was on the page. The script was 76 pages.”
Didn’t anybody in that Tokyo hotel have an Ambien?
She said it was before Ambien became so popular. Later, when it became the soporific of choice, she popped one on a flight to Berlin and ended up standing on the luggage carousel in a haze, with no memory of how she got her bags to the hotel. “I felt like I was on methamphetamines or something. I had such a weird, out-of-body, speedy, strange experience.”
After a nearly three-year marriage to Ryan Reynolds, Johansson was married to Romain Dauriac, a French journalist and ad executive, and lived in Paris. They have a daughter, Rose, now 9. The actress and Jost, 42, have a 2-year-old son, Cosmo.
They met when Jost was 23, in his first year with SNL, and Johansson was 21, hosting for the first time. He wrote a sketch featuring her, a parody of the MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant.
He was too preoccupied with his own nascent career to clock Johansson as a love object.
“My first year as a writer, I wasn’t like, ‘I should probably ask one of the hosts out,’” he said. “I was like, ‘Am I going to have a job this year?’”
They saw each other every few years when she came back to host, but they were always involved with other people. Then, when she came to host in 2017, they were both free.
“I asked her out after the host dinner that we have on Tuesday nights,” he said. “I was just like, ‘You want to go grab a drink?’ Then we had drinks until, like, 4 in the morning. It was great. It was not good for my writing, but it was good for my future marriage.”
‘It’s unfathomable to me’
Johansson is a spokesperson for charities and brands; she has appeared in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, L’Oréal, Louis Vuitton and Prada, and she co-founded a skin care line, the Outset. (“I had acne forever,” she said. “It really came out of a need.”)
She has campaigned for Democratic candidates and has spoken out for women’s rights. She met Biden years ago and has visited him in the Oval Office. She likes his values and his team. She said she felt as if she were living through “a weird nightmare,” with polls showing that Donald Trump may be on his way back to the White House.
“Trump?” she said. “It’s unfathomable to me. That’s when I look at Biden and think, given the fact that the election is in a few months’ time, what are we doing? I have friends that are like, ‘Oh, maybe we could consider this person or that person.’ I’m like: ‘What are you talking about? Who?’ It just seems to me like totally the wrong time to not support Biden. It seems crazy. It’s really depressing.”
She’s not worried about his age?
“No!” she shot back. “Are you? I’m worried about the Democratic Party.”
I asked Johansson, who is Jewish, what she thought of the ugly eruptions of antisemitism across the country.
“I’m not surprised by antisemitism,” she replied simply. “It shouldn’t be surprising.” (She was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the 2019 movie Jojo Rabbit, playing the mother of a Hitler youth; the child learns that she is part of the resistance and hiding a Jewish girl in the house.)
Along with the Danish heritage on her father’s side, she has Jewish and Eastern European heritage on her mother’s side. “My parents used to call all of us ‘Danish knishes,’” she said.
She had a modest upbringing in an artsy family, auditioning for roles from the time she was little and learning the hard way how to take rejection, even crying on the subway. She went to Public School 41 and then to high school at the Greenwich Village Professional Children’s School, where her boyfriend was Jack Antonoff. (He wrote a song of longing about her called Better Love, with the lyric: “Scars are in her name/And she scars me with blame/Hey, Scarlett, you’re not the same.”)
When she was 13, her mother moved to Los Angeles and she stayed in New York with her father, an architect.
“It was hard,” she said. “Although my parents were, at that point, separated. They’d been unhappy for such a long time. It was nice to have some peace at home.”
She told Bruce Bozzi on his Hollywood podcast, Table for Two, a couple of years ago that she did not like being “groomed” to be “what you call a bombshell-type actor.” She said being cast in movies as the object of desire made her feel trapped.
I asked her if she still feels that way.
“I think I’ve outgrown that by just a number of years,” she said wryly. About Hollywood’s hunger for sex objects, she said: “The bombshell thing, I don’t know if that changes, really. It’s societal, it’s so baked in.”
She’s no Joan of Arc. And yet ...
Even though she periodically speaks up on matters she cares about, no one was expecting her to lead the charge on two of the biggest issues facing her industry.
“She’s not Joan of Arc,” Michaels said, chuckling. “But she does not back down.”
Recently, when I was interviewing Sean Penn, he spoke of Johansson — a former inamorata — with awe: “She’s been twice on the cutting edge of stuff. She’s a baller. She’s one of the top people to me.”
Her record in making behemoths bow is impressive: two for two.
Her most recent bout was with Sam Altman of OpenAI. In May, when Altman debuted his company’s new voice assistant, Jost received a text from a friend asking: “Have you heard the new ChatGPT voice, it sounds exactly like your wife.”
Last year, Altman had asked Johansson — who plays an artificial intelligence virtual assistant called Samantha that grows ever more human in the movie Her, co-starring Joaquin Phoenix — to do the voice of Sky, one of the voices for OpenAI’s new model, but she had said: “No, thank you. Not for me.”
“I felt I did not want to be at the forefront of that,” she told me. “I just felt it went against my core values.” She added: “I don’t like to kiss and tell. He came to me with this, and I didn’t tell anybody except my husband.”
She continued, “I also felt for my children it would be strange. I try to be mindful of them.” She was bothered by the “nebulous” nature of the technology and where it’s headed. (In Her, which was set in far-off 2025, Samantha says, “I’m becoming much more than they programmed,” has an orgasm and falls in love.)
OpenAI wanted a voice that would make its new technology sound trustworthy and alluring, even though no one — including Altman — knows exactly where this technology is headed.
Altman and Elon Musk started OpenAI as a watchdog nonprofit to look out for the interest of humans in the AI race, but the two Silicon Valley giants parted ways, and Altman turned part of OpenAI into a lucrative for-profit enterprise in 2019. (Musk sued OpenAI this year for abandoning its original mission and going for the big bucks, but four months later dropped his suit.)
When Johansson heard Sky and “that voice was introduced out into the wild, it was surreal. Suddenly, I was getting all these messages.”
The day of the launch, Altman posted one word on the social platform X: “her.” The star of Her fired off a statement, saying the voice was “eerily similar” to hers and that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief.”
“I had actively avoided being a part of the conversation, which was what made it so disturbing,” she told me. “I was like, ‘How did I get wrapped up in this?’” She added, “It was crazy. I was so angry.”
She does not even have a presence on social media because, as she has said, she does not want to share everything in her life with a bunch of strangers.
“I think the fact that it was never an appealing thing for her is probably part of what keeps her a little healthier,” Jost said.
Altman said in a statement that he had hired a different actress to voice Sky, a woman who just happened to have a similar voice, before he asked Johansson to be “a sixth voice” for ChatGPT. It was all a misunderstanding, he said, not a mimicking or cloning of her voice. But he “paused” the voice of Sky after Johansson complained.
I asked her if Altman would make a good Marvel villain.
“I guess he would — maybe with a robotic arm,” she said, flashing her luminous smile.
She said that no one was truly insulated from the unknowns of our new universe of digital replicas and deepfakes, because there’s no comprehensive legislation to regulate it.
“It’s like this dark wormhole you can never climb your way out of,” she said. “Once you try to take something down in one area, it pops up somewhere else. There are other countries that have different legislation and rules. If your ex-partner is putting out revenge, deepfake porn, your whole life can be completely ruined.” (She learned a hard lesson in 2011 about the porousness of privacy in the tech era when a hacker got hold of nude pictures in her phone that she had taken for her first husband, Reynolds; the hacker was later arrested by the FBI and convicted.)
Johansson knows that AI will have positive effects in some areas, like medicine, but said: “I think technologies move faster than our fragile human egos can process it, and you see the effects all over, especially with young people. This technology is coming like a thousand-foot wave.”
Her friend, British actor Rupert Friend, with whom she is shooting the new Jurassic World movie, was impressed with her victory.
“I think it’s a blow for the little guy, if the little guy is humanity,” he said. “If she rolls over, or if she got squashed, then the rest of us have got no shot.”
In 2021, she also took on the mighty mouse, Disney, filing a lawsuit alleging breach of contract because the studio released Black Widow on Disney+ Premier Access simultaneously with its theatrical release.
There is a technological earthquake upending the old Hollywood model. The creative class is waging a war with the suits to get protection as AI and streaming upend the old ways, on everything from the right to own their own images and voices and words, to the right to get a fair share of streaming revenue.
To paraphrase James Mason talking to Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Disney’s CEO at the time, Bob Chapek, who was later ousted, rather overplayed his hand. When the studio accused Johansson of being “callous” about the effects of the pandemic when she objected to the dual release because it would eat into the theatrical box-office profits, which substantially determined her salary, Chapek did not see that he was coming across as King Kong stomping after Fay Wray.
She had, after all, helped make Disney billions with her long reign as the slinky redheaded Black Widow in the Marvel franchise. As her agent, Bryan Lourd, put it in his response, they attacked her character and violated her contract, deliberately moving “the revenue stream and profits to the Disney+ side of the company, leaving artistic and financial partners out of their new equation.”
She called the lawsuit “a blur” because it came at the height of Covid, just as she was about to have her baby. Disney relented within three months and settled with the star.
“I don’t hold a grudge,” she said. “I think it was just poor judgment and poor leadership at that time. It just felt very unprofessional to me, the entire ordeal. And honestly, I was incredibly disappointed, especially because I was holding out hope until, finally, my team was like, ‘You have to act.’”
Courtesy and dirty jokes
Johansson is in postproduction for her first directing effort, Eleanor the Great, a movie about two women, a 90-year-old Floridian tourist and a 19-year-old student in New York, who strike up a friendship.
When I met with the actress, she had just taken a 25-hour flight from Thailand, where she was in the jungle, pretending to run away from dinosaurs for the latest Jurassic World film.
“There’s an old adage in acting,” Friend said. “When people are looking at the script or their lines for the day, they go, ‘BS, BS, BS, my bit, BS, BS, my bit, my bit, BS, BS.’”
“Scarlett is the complete contrary of that,” he added. “She, in real life, actually asks you a question and wants to know the answer. You would be surprised how many people get so wrapped up in their world, their hotel room, their agent, their head shot, their latest deal, their Oscar. Scarlett really sets the tone for a movie of collaborators who are treating each other with courtesy and a fair amount of dirty jokes.”
She and Friend are also appearing in the coming Wes Anderson film The Phoenician Scheme.
It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t gush over Johansson. Anderson is no different. He has known her since she was a teenager, he said, and when he directed her in last year’s Asteroid City, he could see her turning into a “great, great actress, like Gena Rowlands or Anna Magnani.”
“She’s also the most charming person to work with, great fun and really funny,” he said. “She’s pretty stupendous.”
Jost told me that people are always surprised at “how much normal stuff she does. She goes to the supermarket. She’s just very good at wearing a hat and she keeps moving. She is able to stay a little under the radar, but she’s able to do all these everyday things and enjoy them, too.”
“I think part of the reason I fell in love with her is she’s a great mum,” he added. “I’ve known Rose, my stepdaughter, since she was 2. It’s weird. You get to actually preview someone as a mum.”
Jost did complain, however, about the time Johansson gave him a facial to promote her skin-care brand — “Never again,” he said — and when she suggested he try a manicure.
“It was nails on a chalkboard,” he said, accidentally making a pun. “I don’t like people poking and prodding me.”
Johansson said she had been in romantic relationships with actors that became competitive, and in which one person had the sensation of sacrificing more than the other. But she said that her relationship with Jost is not competitive and that he is not intimidated by her dry, wicked sense of humour.
He is not even daunted by her stature, thanks to her nine Marvel movies, as one of the top-grossing actresses of all time.
“It’s hard for me to imagine that that wouldn’t be an incredibly attractive quality,” she said slyly.
She calls Jost’s comedy “joyful, not meanspirited at all.”
“We love to laugh,” she said. “That, to me, it’s so important. It’s a really attractive quality when someone is funny. I had a boyfriend once who got mad at me for not laughing at his jokes. He was like, ‘You never laugh at my jokes.’ I’m like, ‘I’m laughing inside.’”
For his part, Jost wants to be clear that they don’t sit around all day lost in merriment.
“It’s not like we’re laughing all the time,” he said. “We’re also figuring a lot of stuff out. We like being around friends who we laugh with, too.”
Johansson said she loves walking around New York, “miles and miles,” in her white Hokas, and hanging out in Central Park.
And nobody bothers her?
“No,” she said, smiling. “It’s New York.”
Confirm of deny
Maureen Dowd: You have an Avengers text chain.
Scarlett Johansson: Yes, that’s true. But hopefully, nobody will ever read it. Everything goes on in there. I mean, really. If somebody’s gotten terrible reviews, that could be something that comes up. The Avengers, we’re like a family. We’ve been through an incredible experience over a decade plus of time. It was life-changing for all of us. If you text the chain, you can guarantee that within a few minutes, most people will respond, which is great.
You want a Lauren Sanchez-style figurehead of yourself on the Staten Island Ferry boat that Colin co-owns with Pete Davidson.
Only if it is me and Michael Che face to face.
You’d rather go to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner than the Oscars.
Yes, that is true.
You’re an ace at karaoke.
I’m ready to go anytime. My go-to song is Billy Joel and Tony Bennett’s New York State of Mind.
Your first big role as a child was a skit on Conan O’Brien’s show.
Yes, I came on to do a spelling bee. I played a spelling champion who was a terrible speller, but I was very sweet. I ended up winning over the judges just by the fact that I was cute, and not that I could actually spell.
You’d take Nasa over SpaceX any day.
Yes, that’s true.
You take a lot of showers.
I stopped showering as much as I did as a teenager. I definitely shower a few times a day.
Tom Cruise tried to recruit you into Scientology.
(Laughing) I have never actively been recruited into Scientology.
You sang with David Bowie on your 2008 album covering Tom Waits’ songs, Anywhere I Lay My Head.
He did it separately, but I think it’s the greatest sentence I’ve ever said: David Bowie sang backup for me.
Despite everything, you still love Disney World.
I loved it, and I still do.
You have a morbid fear of birds, yet you starred in a movie about Alfred Hitchcock.
That’s true, although that movie was about Psycho. I just think maybe the wings, the flapping of the wings, and the sharp claws and beaks, and the jerky movements. I don’t like any of that.
You’re a beekeeper.
Sam Jackson [Samuel L. Jackson, her Avengers co-star] gave my ex-husband and I bees as a wedding present. We were in LA at the time, but I didn’t realise how much maintenance a beehive is. You really need to keep them.
You don’t like the nickname ScarJo.
I want to know who started it.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maureen Dowd
Photographs by: Thea Traff
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
