A study in Scarlett

After standing up to both Disney and OpenAI, the actor Scarlett Johansson boldly plants her producer flag with the release of her company’s first film, “Fly Me to the Moon”. By Maureen Dowd. Photographs by Thea Traff

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 says, 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, is curled up on a couch at the Whitby Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, her bare feet tucked under her. 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 says.

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 says his character was “some combination of [US Senate minority leader] Mitch McConnell and Foghorn Leghorn”.

Actor Scarlett Johansson defiantly stands her ground on the issues that matter to her.

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. 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. 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, who just turned 10. The actress and Jost, 42, have a three-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. 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,” Jost says. “I was just like, ‘You want to go grab a drink?’ Then we had drinks until, like, four in the morning. It was great. It was not good for my writing, but it was good for my future marriage.”

Johansson has campaigned for US Democratic candidates and has spoken out for women’s rights. She says she feels as if she is living through “a weird nightmare”, with some polls suggesting that Donald Trump could be on his way back to the White House. I ask Johansson, who is Jewish, what she thinks of the ugly eruptions of antisemitism across the US. “I’m not surprised by antisemitism,” she replies 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.)

Even though Johansson 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. 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.” When Johansson heard Sky and “that voice was introduced out into the wild, it was surreal. Suddenly, I was getting all these messages.” Altman said in a statement 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.

In 2021, she also took on Disney, filing a lawsuit alleging breach of contract because the studio released “Black Widow” on Disney+ Premier Access simultaneously with its theatrical release. 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”. Johansson calls the lawsuit “a blur” because it came at the height of Covid-19, just as she was about to have her baby. Disney relented within three months and settled with the star.

Jost tells me people are 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.”

Johansson says she loves walking around New York, “miles and miles”, in her white Hokas, and hanging out in Central Park. Nobody bothers her? “No,” she says, smiling. “It’s New York.” 

© The New York Times

This is an extract from an article that appears in print in our thirteenth edition, Page 12 of Winning Magazine with the headline: “A study in Scarlett". Subscribe to Winning Magazine today.