Scarlett Johansson is crying and holding a knife. This is not as scary as it sounds. It is afternoon in New York City, and Johansson is standing in the kitchen of Greer Nuttall, a Southern-raised chef who worked for the legendary Alice Waters. Nuttall is giving us a lesson in proper knife technique—thwap, thwap, thwap on a thick wooden cutting board—and it was idyllic until the onions. Johansson is an enthusiastic amateur chef, known to host lively dinner parties, but she and onions do not mix. Her tears come fast and freely, and I’m not talking about the kind of light mist that many of us get when chopping the pungent bulb. Forty seconds into an onion, and one of the most glamorous actresses alive is pink-eyed and sniffling and looking like she’s been asked to put a cat to sleep.
“It’s so bad! I’m a mess,” Johansson says, laughing. She is dressed in a checkered blue shirt, dark jeans, brown boots, and a pair of dark-rimmed eyeglasses that offer no defense. “This happens to me every time. . . .”
Johansson puts the blade down and steps away from the counter.
“I’m never going to be Alice Waters!” she says ruefully. “I could never realize my potential at Benihana.”
Johansson excuses herself. A moment later, the woman who beguiled Bill Murray in Lost in Translation returns wearing two sets of glasses—her eyeglasses and her sunglasses—at once, pushed together, dangling over her nose. This is as scary as it sounds—Julia Child meets Jerry Lewis.
“I never thought we’d be crying this early in the day,” Johansson cracks drily. “Normally it happens after the sun goes down . . . and I’m in my shower.”
There it is, the famous Scarlett Johansson sense of humor: droll, self-deprecating, deadpan.
“I always say that if you were on a road trip, you’d definitely want Scarlett in your car,” says her friend Chris Evans, who costars alongside Johansson in this month’s comic-book superhero spectacular The Avengers. “She’s kind of always laughing, even when she’s in a bad mood.”
You probably don’t need to be told that the past year or so has been, at times, challenging for Johansson—a painful, public separation and divorce; a mind-bogglingly invasive computer-hacking attack against Johansson and other celebrities that resulted in criminal charges. It’s a stretch that would grind anyone down, but she has gamely pushed forward. Maybe it’s that sense of humor, maybe it’s the relentless New York in her, but at 27 years of age she has figured out how to roll up her sleeves, put on her glasses—and then, perhaps, a second pair of glasses—and charge on through.
“I mean, looking back on it now, that was almost ten years ago, which is crazy,” Johansson says. We are sitting in Neil’s, an unfussy coffee shop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, talking about the surreal time in 2003 when it seemed Scarlett Johansson was suddenly everywhere. She had just appeared in Lost in Translation, as well as Girl with a Pearl Earring, and though Johansson had been in movies since she was a child, it was as if a switch had flicked in the culture and there she was, the ingenue of the moment with the irresistibly smoky voice.
“It feels like a lifetime ago,” Johansson says. “Am I happy I’m not 20 anymore? Yeah. Nineteen? I don’t want to be that age. It’s incredibly confusing.”
She concedes that the post–Lost in Translation blow-up was “hard to navigate.” After some big circuses (The Island) and some smaller films (In Good Company), a happy accident arrived in a partnership with Woody Allen. Allen was on the verge of making Match Point when Kate Winslet suddenly dropped out of the film. “Someone suggested Scarlett, and she was available,” Allen says. “I’ve been crazy about her ever since.”
“I forged this unbelievable friendship with somebody who saw the potential in me at that age,” Johansson says. She would later work with Allen on Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “Not that the parts he wrote weren’t sexy, but they had substance to them.”
The same could be said of Johansson, who in person is self-effacing and endearingly wonky (she’ll take the White House Correspondents’ dinner over an awards show any day) and, were she not an established sex symbol, could easily be Scarlett, your chatty neighbor from across the hall. The designer Stella McCartney tells of meeting the actress one night at New York’s Carlyle hotel. “We started sipping dirty martinis with some friends of hers, and she opened a debate, which was ‘Are you born a killer, or are you made into a killer?’ " McCartney recalls. “I thought, Wow, she’s not just a pretty blonde actor.”
Johansson appears pathologically averse to caution—the more atypical and risky the idea, the more attractive it seems. This is part of the reason her résumé is stacked with memorable indies (Ghost World, for instance) and why her side music career (an idiosyncratic album of Tom Waits covers; a collaboration with singer-songwriter Pete Yorn) is anything but Top 40 formula. Her roots are New York concrete, not Hollywood glitz. “I think there are some celebrities who are crazy about being in the scene and the whole Hollywood thing, but that’s not Scarlett,” says Johansson’s friend jewelry artist Sonia Boyajian.
In 2008 Johansson married the actor Ryan Reynolds, but the couple wasn’t interested in feeding the spectacle. “We always kept our story private—how we met, our wedding, everything,” she says. “It was about us.”
A married Johansson would later embark on what was perhaps the biggest risk of her acting career, making her Broadway debut playing Catherine alongside Liev Schreiber’s obsessive Eddie in Arthur Miller’s brawny A View from the Bridge. She rose to the pressure of the high-profile revival, wowing critics and later that spring winning a Tony Award for her performance. “I couldn’t get over how brave she was,” says Schreiber, a stage veteran. “Coming into that experience would be pretty intimidating for just about anybody and usually cripples actors. I was blown away by how fearless she seemed.”
It was exhausting, but Johansson embraced Broadway life; at another lunch, in a health-food restaurant in SoHo, she talks nostalgically of the “underbelly of Times Square,” hanging out by the stage door with the crew, and even the time a stage manager bawled her out for being late to rehearsal (she was never late again). “I know it sounds supercorny, but it was a dream come true,” she says. “That sort of pressure of having to deliver—I just find it thrilling.”
The summer saw her appear as Black Widow alongside Robert Downey, Jr., in the successful Iron Man 2, and she knew The Avengers was coming, but she took a long time hunting for her next film. She spent hot, languid days in New Orleans with Reynolds, who was shooting Green Lantern. They went on a road trip through Europe, but Johansson says she was distracted. “It was nice, but at the same time, I was like, ‘What am I going to do with myself?’ ” she says. “I don’t know. I was waiting.”
Johansson describes this unsettled period as “a hard time . . . I was feeling very out of my own skin.” Then headlines appeared in December 2010: Johansson and Reynolds had split. The couple released a brief, civilized statement: “We entered our relationship with love and it’s with love and kindness we leave it. While privacy isn’t expected, it’s certainly appreciated.”
The divorce was finalized in the summer of 2011. Johansson describes it as “comically amicable,” but the parting was far from painless. “It was horrible,” she says. “Of course it’s horrible. It was devastating. It really throws you. You think that your life is going to be one way, and then, for various reasons or whatever, it doesn’t work out.
“This was something I never thought I would be doing,” she continues. “And there’s no way to navigate it. Nobody can give you the right answer. It’s never anything you want to hear. It’s a very lonely thing. It’s like the loneliest thing you’ll ever do, in some way.”
As for the marriage, Johansson sounds almost wistful as she talks about the importance of time. “I’m not saying more time in the marriage, but just having more time with my ex and really clocking those hours of face time with the person you love, really live together and not having the pressure of two people that have these careers. . . .” She has no regrets about getting married; she describes the experience with genuine affection. “It was a beautiful thing,” Johansson says. “The falling in love and getting married and making that commitment . . . I think it’s nice to know that you’re capable of loving somebody in that way. I think it’s a rare opportunity.”
She says she is still recovering and doesn’t pretend the divorce is fully in the rearview. “I don’t feel on the other side of it completely, but it gets better,” she says. “It’s still there. More than anything, it’s just that not having your buddy around all the time is weird. There’s no rule book. I think it’s just time.”
During this stressful period, sanctuary would come from, of all places, a zoo—specifically, director Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo, in which Johansson played a zookeeper at a run-down animal park purchased by a writer played by Matt Damon. The film was shot mostly outside in the serene hills of Thousand Oaks, California, and Johansson calls the experience “blissful . . . like some hippie dream.” She lavishes praise on Crowe, as well as Damon, whom she calls “suspiciously wonderful,” and says that making the film offered her comfort and protection.
It was around then that Johansson began to be seen in the company of actor Sean Penn. “We spent time together, yeah,” she says. “I never put a title on it, really, but we were seeing each other.” She says she was startled by the amount of media attention the pairing received. “In my marriage, funnily enough, we had relative privacy,” she says, but the fuss over her and Penn “was a little bit of an adjustment.” She says she and Penn have remained friends, and she praises his extensive relief work in Haiti. “He’s a remarkable person,” she says. “He really is.”
