Interview Magazine

Scarlett Johansson 

by

Arianna Huffington

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: How are you?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: I’m good. I’m in dry, sunny Glasgow right now, enjoying the tropical weather. [laughs] I’m doing a film here called Under the Skin. It’s a project that I’ve been talking about with Jonathan [Glazer] for a few years now—I think he’s actually been working on it, in different incarnations, for about eight or nine years.

HUFFINGTON: So on the one hand, you’re putting yourself out there to draw attention to things you think are important. But then, on the other hand, there are aspects of your personal life that the media obsesses over that you’d like to keep private. How do you balance it all?

JOHANSSON: I don’t really profess to know how to balance any of it. [laughs] I don’t profess to know how to balance the positive and the negative media attention. It’s a gamble every time you put yourself out there, and, certainly, I’m always readjusting to it. But I hope it never becomes normal to feel scrutinized. I value my privacy and my personal life—and I certainly don’t exploit my personal life. But that’s not always in your control. There are, unfortunately, people who are interested in prying. So I think you have to protect your private life as much as you possibly can, and, at the same time, find ways to redirect that focus and turn the glare into a positive thing. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how anybody’s ever done it. . . . You know, my favorite actors are actors who are enigmatic and mysterious and never make the obvious choice in terms of the projects they do or who they work with or their craft. But I think that the less I know about an actor, the more chance I have of allowing their own persona to kind of slip away so I can get completely lost in the character they’re playing, and the more that people think they know about your personal life, the more difficult it becomes to preserve that. So when I’m not working or promoting something, I try to be as under-the-radar as I can . . . This has just been a bit of a crazy year.

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