Scarlett Johansson, who played the voice in Her and then had to defend her own

Scarlett Johansson

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 22, 1984 Manhattan, New York City, USA
Occupation	Actress, director and producer
Known for	Avengers: Infinity War, The Avengers, Avengers: Endgame
Awards	BAFTA · Tony Award · Rome Film Festival · Saturn Award · Toronto Film Critics Association

The performance people still bring up first when they talk about Scarlett Johansson has no face in it. In Spike Jonze’s Her she plays Samantha, an operating system that a lonely writer falls in love with, and the whole character lives in a voice: husky, curious, a beat too quick to laugh. Years later that voice came back to her from somewhere she had not sent it. When OpenAI showed off a ChatGPT voice called Sky, her friends, her family and a good part of the press told her it sounded like her. She had, she said, turned down Sam Altman‘s request to voice the system, and she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that he would pursue a voice so close to hers. OpenAI pulled Sky. The actress who once played a machine learning to be a person spent the following months arguing that a person is not raw material for a machine.

That fight says more about where she stands now than any box-office table, although the tables are generous: she ranks among the three highest-grossing actors in history, and Forbes put her back at the top of its list of best-paid actresses on the strength of Jurassic World Rebirth. Yet the choices around that blockbuster point somewhere else: a first feature as a director, supporting parts for Wes Anderson at a fraction of her usual fee, a family crime drama for James Gray, her first real horror film and a place in the next Batman. Past forty, she is the one deciding what a Scarlett Johansson film looks like.

Greenwich Village, a grandfather in Copenhagen and two lines on stage

Scarlett Ingrid Johansson grew up in Manhattan, one of four children of Melanie Sloan, a New York producer, and Karsten Johansson, an architect from Copenhagen, with a twin brother, Hunter, a sister, Vanessa, and a brother, Adrian, plus an older half-brother, Christian, from her father’s first marriage. She was born on November 22, 1984, holds both American and Danish citizenship, and has a screen artist in the family tree: her paternal grandfather, Ejner Johansson, was an art historian, screenwriter and film director. She went to PS 41 in Greenwich Village, then to the Professional Children’s School, a private school built around the schedules of young performers, and took classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.

Her first time on a stage was an off-Broadway production of Sophistry alongside Ethan Hawke, with two lines. Her first film came soon after: Rob Reiner’s North, in which she played John Ritter’s daughter at nine. The roles grew quickly. Manny & Lo earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination as a child lead, and on The Horse Whisperer Robert Redford described her as “13 going on 30”, a line that followed her for years. In Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff’s comedy about two friends drifting apart after high school, her dry, watchful Rebecca won the Toronto Film Critics Association award for best supporting actress. In 2002 she applied to the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and was turned down.

Tokyo, Delft and the jump to adult roles

The move from promising teenager to leading actress happened in one season. In Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation she played Charlotte, a young American stranded in a Tokyo hotel with a husband who is never around, who drifts into a friendship with a fading film star played by Bill Murray. The film is built on pauses and half-finished sentences, and she held her half of it with very little dialogue. It won her the BAFTA for best actress in a leading role. In the same year Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring cast her as Griet, the maid in Johannes Vermeer’s household in Delft, in a performance that is almost silent; critics wrote that her face did the work the script refused to do, and it brought BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations.

What followed was a run of directors who wanted that stillness for their own purposes. A Love Song for Bobby Long, opposite John Travolta, added another Golden Globe nomination. Woody Allen used her three times, first as Nola Rice, the struggling actress at the centre of the adultery thriller Match Point, which brought a further Golden Globe nomination, then in Scoop and in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, one of the most profitable films of his late career. Michael Bay gave her a double role as a clone and the woman she was copied from in The Island, and Christopher Nolan cast her as the magicians’ assistant in The Prestige, a critical and commercial success.

Natasha Romanoff and the Marvel decade

In Iron Man 2 she walked into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Natasha Romanoff, a Russian-trained spy introduced as Tony Stark’s new assistant. She stayed for close to ten years. The Avengers became one of the biggest hits of its year, Captain America: The Winter Soldier paired her with Chris Evans for a paranoid spy story that many fans still rate as the best of the series, and on Avengers: Age of Ultron the production hid her pregnancy with tight framing and stunt doubles. Captain America: Civil War passed a billion dollars, and Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame closed the arc; Endgame ranks as the second-highest-grossing film ever released. Over that stretch Natasha went from a supporting spy to the member of the team whose loyalty holds the others together, and Johansson became the one woman who was part of the original Avengers line-up.

The solo film arrived late. Black Widow, on which she was also an executive producer, went back to Natasha’s past in a Soviet training programme and opened in 2021, during the pandemic, on the same day in cinemas and on Disney+ for an extra fee. Within weeks Johansson sued Disney, arguing that her contract promised an exclusive theatrical release and that the simultaneous streaming launch had cut the box-office bonuses she was owed. Disney answered publicly that she had already been paid 20 million dollars. The two sides settled in September 2021 on undisclosed terms, and both said they would keep working together. It was one of the first times a star of her size took a studio to court over a streaming release.

An alien in Glasgow and a voice in a phone

The strongest work she did in the middle of the Marvel years was far from any franchise. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin she plays an alien who drives a van around Scotland picking up men, many of the scenes shot with hidden cameras and non-actors who did not know who she was. Several critics called it the finest performance of her career. The same year brought Her, and the Rome Film Festival gave her its best actress award for a role in which she is never seen, a rare prize for a voice performance; she also won the Saturn Award for best supporting actress. Luc Besson’s Lucy then showed how far that strange, blank-eyed persona could travel commercially: the film cost around 40 million dollars and took more than 450 million.

Broadway, two albums and a double Oscar nomination

Johansson has kept one foot on stage. In 2010 she made her Broadway debut in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, as the orphaned niece Catherine, and won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a play; one critic wrote that she melted into the character so thoroughly that her celebrity disappeared. Her Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in 2013, drew much harder reviews. She has also recorded two albums: Anywhere I Lay My Head, a set of Tom Waits songs with David Bowie on backing vocals on two tracks, and Break Up, a duet record with Pete Yorn modelled on Serge Gainsbourg’s duet albums. By 2017 she had hosted Saturday Night Live five times, joining the show’s Five-Timers Club.

The critical peak came at the end of the decade. In Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story she played Nicole Barber, an actress working her way through a bitter divorce from a theatre director played by Adam Driver, a part she shot while going through her own divorce. In Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit she was Rosie, a mother in Nazi Germany hiding a Jewish girl in her attic while her son idolises an imaginary Hitler. At the 2020 Academy Awards she was nominated for best actress and for best supporting actress in the same year, only the twelfth performer to manage it. She won neither.

The arguments she did not win

For an actress who now argues hard for control over her own image, her record on casting is not spotless, and she has had to answer for it. Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 live-action version of the Japanese manga, cast her as a cyborg built around the memories of a Japanese woman, and the backlash over whitewashing followed the film through its release; she defended the role as a rare chance to lead a female franchise. A year later she agreed to play Dante “Tex” Gill, a transgender man, in Rub & Tug, answered the first criticism dismissively and then withdrew from the project, saying she had learned from the reaction. In 2014 she stepped down as an Oxfam ambassador after the charity objected to her advertising deal with SodaStream, keeping the contract and giving up the charity role. None of these ended her career, but they complicate the picture of the principled holdout that the Disney and OpenAI episodes created.

Wes Anderson, dinosaurs and a first film as director

The last few years have been built around deliberate contrasts. For Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City she played a film star named Midge Campbell and, like the rest of the ensemble, worked for scale, a small weekly fee instead of her usual rate; she returned for his The Phoenician Scheme as Cousin Hilda. Fly Me to the Moon, a space-race romantic comedy with Channing Tatum, was produced through her own company, These Pictures, and did poorly at the box office. She voiced Elita-1 in the animated Transformers One and took a supporting role in My Mother’s Wedding, Kristin Scott Thomas’s first film as director. Then came Jurassic World Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards, in which she plays Zora Bennett, a covert-operations specialist hired to bring back dinosaur DNA from an island. It took more than 860 million dollars worldwide, the biggest hit of her post-Marvel career, and Forbes estimated her 2025 earnings at 43 million dollars, the highest of any actress that year. Across her career, her films have now taken more than 15 billion dollars.

In between she directed. Eleanor the Great, written by Tory Kamen, stars June Squibb as a 94-year-old woman who moves to New York after the death of her best friend and, in a support group for Holocaust survivors, tells her late friend’s story as if it were her own. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 and was released in September by Sony Pictures Classics. Reviews were mixed about the direction and warm about Squibb, and the film also competed for the Caméra d’Or, the Cannes prize for first features.

The AI question has not gone away either. In February 2025 a fabricated video that used her likeness, along with those of other Jewish celebrities, spread across social networks; she condemned it and called for laws against the misuse of artificial intelligence, which she described as an imminent danger to everyone. For a performer whose voice was once the whole character, the argument is personal.

Paper Tiger, a new Exorcist and Gotham

Her next months are crowded. Paper Tiger, written and directed by James Gray, reunites her with Adam Driver and adds Miles Teller as two brothers in 1980s Queens who chase a business opportunity and end up tangled with the Russian mob; she plays Hester Pearl, the wife and mother whose suburban home becomes the target. The film competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 2026, but Johansson missed the premiere because she was shooting another film. She saw it with an audience for the first time on September 25, when it opened the 64th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, having just flown in from London; on stage she joked that it felt like five in the morning and that she was hallucinating. Neon opens it in American cinemas on November 13.

In December she is the voice of Venus Nova, a controversial megastar, in Ray Gunn, Brad Bird’s animated detective story about a private eye, voiced by Sam Rockwell, in a retro-futurist city called Metropia; she also sings in the film, which reaches select cinemas on December 4 and Netflix on December 18. It is her third film with Rockwell after Iron Man 2 and Jojo Rabbit. The film that kept her from Cannes is The Exorcist: Martyrs, Mike Flanagan’s new chapter in the horror franchise, in which she plays a mother opposite Jacobi Jupe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Diane Lane and Laurence Fishburne. It wrapped in New York in June and Universal has dated it for March 12, 2027. She is now in England on Matt Reeves’s The Batman: Part II, playing Gilda Dent, wife of Harvey Dent, played by Sebastian Stan, in a sequel dated for February 2028.

Family, business and the private side

Johansson has been married three times. Her marriage to Ryan Reynolds lasted from 2008 to 2011. With the French journalist Romain Dauriac she had a daughter, Rose Dorothy, in 2014, and they divorced in 2017. In 2020 she married Colin Jost, the long-time Weekend Update co-anchor on Saturday Night Live, and their son, Cosmo, was born in 2021. Jost was at her side on the New York Film Festival carpet this autumn. Away from films she runs The Outset, the skincare company she co-founded, and she has long supported USA Harvest, a food-rescue charity. She stays off social media and keeps her children out of the press, which may be why the few fights she does take public, over a streaming contract or a synthetic voice, land with such force.

What comes next is already on the calendar: a James Gray family drama in November, a Brad Bird cartoon in December, a Mike Flanagan horror film in March and a Batman villain’s wife after that. None of them looks much like the others, and that seems to be the point.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Black Widow, James Gray, Paper Tiger

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