Scarlett Johansson recalls being ‘hypersexualized’ as young actress

nypost.com:

Armchair Expert” podcast, host Dax Shepard said Johansson, 37, has what the calls “the X factor” — a natural likability that can’t be described.The “Black Widow” actress was grateful for the compliment, but went on to explain that how the public perceived her has been misrepresented since she was a child.“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,” Johansson said. “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.”Johannson, who made her first on-screen appearance in the movie “North” in 1994 at just nine years old, explained that people assumed she was always older than she actually was.“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 hypersexualized thing.

I felt like [my career] was over,” she said on the podcast. “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,” she continued. “So 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.”Johannson’s marker of success was when she stared in “Lost in Translation” alongside Bill Murray in 2003, playing the role of a 22-year-old woman when she was just 17.The founder of skincare line “The Outset” recalled she “definitely was in different situations that were not age appropriate,” but was lucky enough to have a mom that “was really good about protecting” her while she was.