By Patrick Gavin
Senior staff writer
At 21 years and 23 days old, Scarlett Johansson is younger than me, and for some reason, that’s just creepy.
Actors, athletes, musicians- they’re all old, aren’t they? Older than us kids anyway.
Talking to Scarlett Johansson only reaffirms this notion. You feel like a 10-year-old, like you need to raise your hand and be called on to ask her a question, which is particularly difficult to do in a phone interview.
It’s probably true she has an old soul inside her. How else can you explain Johansson being cast by Sofia Coppola to play a newlywed Yale graduate in Lost In Translation at 17-years-old? In this film – the blossoming actress’s defining role thus far – she displayed an uncanny maturity that made all of Hollywood sit up and take notice.
Johansson is so grown beyond her years that after filming Lost In Translation, she claimed to have made such a bond with older men that she couldn’t see herself dating anyone under 30. Within months, she was dating Benicio Del Toro, the mysterious actor who’s 17 years her senior.
Though she’s made her name acting as an older woman on screen, she still plays a normal 21-year-old in real life. On Nov. 22, her birthday, she did what most of us remember doing – OK fine, don’t remember doing – after the 5th shot on our 21st: She got hammered.
“I made it this far!” Johansson says in a phone interview. At that point in time, mid-November, her big night was still in the planning stage. “I’m going to have a little get-together with friends. I’m pretty low-key. I just want to have a good time.”
Even her drink of choice is old-fashioned. Well, make that drinks: Jack Daniels and ginger ale and a Seven and Seven.
“I don’t need to go to some nightclub and have a crazy night,” she says. “I just want to have a crazy night in private.”
She sloughs off any kind of wild-child, party-girl image, though one of Johansson’s co-stars, British actor Matthew Goode, might have you thinking differently.
“She’s very thoughtful, she likes to drink and she knows how to dance,” Goode says in a separate interview.
“My kind of girl,” he says.
Yet in talking to Johansson for any significant period of time, one can tell her devotion lies in her craft and not in the glamour that comes with it.
Her latest film, Woody Allen-helmed drama Match Point, is set to hit select theaters in December (Washington-area theaters in early January) and also features the aforementioned Goode and on-the-rise Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (to be seen next in Mission: Impossible III).
Match Point has Allen reinventing himself with a drama, not a comedy, that takes place entirely in London, not New York. The intriguing concept behind the film is that so much of our lives depend entirely upon luck, an idea the young actress was eager to touch on.
“I feel like a damn lucky person,” Johansson says. “As it says in the film, it’s scary to think your life is out of control, to think, ‘Oh, it’s down to good luck,’ is scary, and people don’t like to admit that.”
It’s not luck that recently gave the starlet a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress for her performance in Match Point.
In talking about working behind the scenes, Johansson admitted she was eager but also somewhat intimidated by the prospect of working with the famously neurotic director.
“He’s kind of mysterious,” Johansson says. “Nobody knows how he works. You get these stories of not getting the full script and how he doesn’t really work with the actors. I love his movies and I was curious. I didn’t even read the script.”
She and Allen ended up hitting it off so well on the Match Point set the two have since shot another film, a comedy called Scoop with Hugh Jackman.
“I loved working with Woody,” she says. “He far exceeded any expectation – Woody has some neurosis, but we all do. We had a very nice and playful relationship. If I could work with him for the rest of my career, I would be very happy.”
Johansson might not get her wish, but whatever project she’s working on next she feels is bound to be better than hitting the books. In that regard, the mature actress left her peers in her dust a long time ago.
“Writing papers, I see all my friends suffer through it,” Johansson says. “I have friends who are studying sociology and finance and they are constantly writing papers and doing research and going to classes. I can’t imagine that life for me.”
Contact reporter Patrick Gavin at gavindbk@gmail.com.
