Scarlett Johansson – Elle Magazine (November 2008)

Scarlett Johansson is featured in November 2008 issue of Elle Magazine. We’ve prepared a behind the scenes photos, video, and Scarlett’s view on her sexy siren reputation.

That chesty Scotch-and-soda voice is recognizable anywhere, even in the bar of the Hotel de la Reconquista in Oviedo, Spain, where Scarlett Johansson is chatting away. “It was freezing today,” she says, “and everyone on set was saying, ‘Let’s just have a glass of wine at the bar.’” Johansson spent the day with castmates Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz filming a picnic in the hills behind the medieval city of Oviedo. But, as will happen in northern coastal Spain, even in summer, the weather turned, and director Woody Allen kept the actors late to get the shot he needed. “Woody says everybody looks better in overcast weather,” Johansson explains, “which is probably true, but then it started to rain, and Penélope is wearing a nightgown, and I’m wearing some little thing.…”

We relocate to a table away from the film crowd, and she orders, in rudimentary but beautifully accented Spanish, a Jack Daniel’s and ginger ale. While she sounds like no one else but Scarlett Johansson, she doesn’t look exactly like the movie version. She’s as curvy as advertised, and those plush lips need no Cinemascopic enhancement. (This is, after all, a classic visage that has of late been used to sell Louis Vuitton bags and accessories.) But she’s tiny, tucked into a gray cardigan that almost covers her blue-jean cutoffs, as if she’s trying to banish the memory of ever being chilled.

Until her recent star turns as a straight-out-of-college babysitter in The Nanny Diaries and as Anne Boleyn’s younger sister in The Other Boleyn Girl, out in February, Johansson’s career has been a testament to accelerated development. “You can never really believe her age,” says Eric Bana, who plays her lover Henry VIII in Boleyn Girl. “She has an incredibly mature sense of humor, although if she were tired or pissed off, you might get a sliver of grumpy young girl.”

At 15, in Ghost World, she played a high school graduate; at 17, a postcollegiate slacker in Lost in Translation; at 20, a femme fatale in her first Allen film, Match Point. But at this moment, she seems barely her real age, 22, and more like a Salingerian “wise child” exultant with new experience and a desire to have the precise last word.

On the subject of her hat, for instance, a nod to a man’s traditional porkpie number:
“It’s a great hat. It’s straw,” she says.
“It comes down over your head like a bowler,” I reply.
“It’s not a bowler.”
“I said it comes down over your head like a bowler.”
“I like my hats to fit that way. I know, now I look like some schmo off the train.”

Minutes later, Bardem, exactly as rugged and virile as he looks on-screen and fresh off triumphs in No Country for Old Men and Love in the Time of Cholera, walks by. “Hello, darling,” he greets Johansson. “Cómo está?” she says, her finger always on the Spanish trigger. “How’s the gym?”

“The gym was great,” he says. “Because I’m so healthy now, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette.”

Unlike many of her peers cast as contemporary postadolescents, Scarlett Johansson prospers on her own planet icon, unconstrained by her age or by movie genre. She’s persuasive as a seventeenth-century Delft maid in Girl with a Pearl Earring and as a bioengineered clone in The Island. True, some of her films have been merely indie-quirky, and some didn’t pan out at all (even her shimmering bodysuit couldn’t save The Island). But it makes little difference to the inexorably upward arc of her career. Bigger than her last movie, she’s a throwback in a way to the heyday of the Hollywood studio system and its industrious contract players. (After graduating from Manhattan’s Professional Children’s School in 2003, her college equivalency was a blur of movie sets.) “The point is,” she says, “by the time the movie has flopped, you’re looking forward to finishing the next film. The important thing is to keep working.”

View behind-the-scenes video of Scarlett Johansson’s cover shoot

Which brings us to Woody Allen, and her to Oviedo to star in his latest film. In keeping with his usual method, the project has no title or plot that can be divulged beyond a few basics. Apparently, Johansson and the British actress Rebecca Hall are tourists who come to Spain to take in the culture, including local artist Bardem and his ex-girlfriend Cruz. But it’s not a romantic comedy, Johansson says: “It’s sort of a slice of life.” When it’s suggested that a movie with this cast and no love angle would be an exercise in perversity, she relents a little: “There may be some romance in the air.”

Johansson grew up a culture-vulture middle-class Manhattan kid, raised on movies by a cinephile mother. She admits to a case of nerves shooting the first take of Match Point with her idol Allen behind the camera. But now, after last year’s Scoop, the valentine of a murder mystery he created for her, she regards her breezy rapport with the director as nothing out of the ordinary, even as the press has dubbed her his muse, a late-in-the-game successor to Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow.

“We’ve joked about that word,” Johansson tells me. “Woody says, ‘You appear and my writer’s block is cured.’” (Back in New York, I discover an Allen e-mail response: “This is a stupid phrase that journalists use all the time, a cliché with no meaning and bearing no resemblance to anything in Scarlett’s life or my life.”) Johansson has assimilated Allen into her life as she has John Travolta and U2′s Bono, older male colleagues who have become close friends. “Woody’s mannerisms and his wit are classically him,” she says appraisingly. “But when you know someone, your conversation has an intimacy that you couldn’t have predicted from seeing him on the screen. Woody surprises me all the time. On film, you see his neurotic side but not his sensi­ti­vity.” I read to Johansson a recent quote from Allen, that she has “a tiny bit of Marilyn Monroe in her zaftig humidity.” Johansson waits two beats and then laughs a naughty laugh that would have done Mae West proud. “My goodness,” she says. As that great lady herself once said, “Goodness has nothing to do with it.”

That chesty Scotch-and-soda voice is recognizable anywhere, even in the bar of the Hotel de la Reconquista in Oviedo, Spain, where Scarlett Johansson is chatting away. “It was freezing today,” she says, “and everyone on set was saying, ‘Let’s just have a glass of wine at the bar.’” Johansson spent the day with castmates Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz filming a picnic in the hills behind the medieval city of Oviedo. But, as will happen in northern coastal Spain, even in summer, the weather turned, and director Woody Allen kept the actors late to get the shot he needed. “Woody says everybody looks better in overcast weather,” Johansson explains, “which is probably true, but then it started to rain, and Penélope is wearing a nightgown, and I’m wearing some little thing.…”

We relocate to a table away from the film crowd, and she orders, in rudimentary but beautifully accented Spanish, a Jack Daniel’s and ginger ale. While she sounds like no one else but Scarlett Johansson, she doesn’t look exactly like the movie version. She’s as curvy as advertised, and those plush lips need no Cinemascopic enhancement. (This is, after all, a classic visage that has of late been used to sell Louis Vuitton bags and accessories.) But she’s tiny, tucked into a gray cardigan that almost covers her blue-jean cutoffs, as if she’s trying to banish the memory of ever being chilled.

View behind-the-scenes video of Scarlett Johansson’s cover shoot

Until her recent star turns as a straight-out-of-college babysitter in The Nanny Diaries and as Anne Boleyn’s younger sister in The Other Boleyn Girl, out in February, Johansson’s career has been a testament to accelerated development. “You can never really believe her age,” says Eric Bana, who plays her lover Henry VIII in Boleyn Girl. “She has an incredibly mature sense of humor, although if she were tired or pissed off, you might get a sliver of grumpy young girl.”

At 15, in Ghost World, she played a high school graduate; at 17, a postcollegiate slacker in Lost in Translation; at 20, a femme fatale in her first Allen film, Match Point. But at this moment, she seems barely her real age, 22, and more like a Salingerian “wise child” exultant with new experience and a desire to have the precise last word.

On the subject of her hat, for instance, a nod to a man’s traditional porkpie number:
“It’s a great hat. It’s straw,” she says.
“It comes down over your head like a bowler,” I reply.
“It’s not a bowler.”
“I said it comes down over your head like a bowler.”
“I like my hats to fit that way. I know, now I look like some schmo off the train.”

Minutes later, Bardem, exactly as rugged and virile as he looks on-screen and fresh off triumphs in No Country for Old Men and Love in the Time of Cholera, walks by. “Hello, darling,” he greets Johansson. “Cómo está?” she says, her finger always on the Spanish trigger. “How’s the gym?”

“The gym was great,” he says. “Because I’m so healthy now, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette.”

Unlike many of her peers cast as contemporary postadolescents, Scarlett Johansson prospers on her own planet icon, unconstrained by her age or by movie genre. She’s persuasive as a seventeenth-century Delft maid in Girl with a Pearl Earring and as a bioengineered clone in The Island. True, some of her films have been merely indie-quirky, and some didn’t pan out at all (even her shimmering bodysuit couldn’t save The Island). But it makes little difference to the inexorably upward arc of her career. Bigger than her last movie, she’s a throwback in a way to the heyday of the Hollywood studio system and its industrious contract players. (After graduating from Manhattan’s Professional Children’s School in 2003, her college equivalency was a blur of movie sets.) “The point is,” she says, “by the time the movie has flopped, you’re looking forward to finishing the next film. The important thing is to keep working.”

Which brings us to Woody Allen, and her to Oviedo to star in his latest film. In keeping with his usual method, the project has no title or plot that can be divulged beyond a few basics. Apparently, Johansson and the British actress Rebecca Hall are tourists who come to Spain to take in the culture, including local artist Bardem and his ex-girlfriend Cruz. But it’s not a romantic comedy, Johansson says: “It’s sort of a slice of life.” When it’s suggested that a movie with this cast and no love angle would be an exercise in perversity, she relents a little: “There may be some romance in the air.”

Johansson grew up a culture-vulture middle-class Manhattan kid, raised on movies by a cinephile mother. She admits to a case of nerves shooting the first take of Match Point with her idol Allen behind the camera. But now, after last year’s Scoop, the valentine of a murder mystery he created for her, she regards her breezy rapport with the director as nothing out of the ordinary, even as the press has dubbed her his muse, a late-in-the-game successor to Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow.

“We’ve joked about that word,” Johansson tells me. “Woody says, ‘You appear and my writer’s block is cured.’” (Back in New York, I discover an Allen e-mail response: “This is a stupid phrase that journalists use all the time, a cliché with no meaning and bearing no resemblance to anything in Scarlett’s life or my life.”) Johansson has assimilated Allen into her life as she has John Travolta and U2′s Bono, older male colleagues who have become close friends. “Woody’s mannerisms and his wit are classically him,” she says appraisingly. “But when you know someone, your conversation has an intimacy that you couldn’t have predicted from seeing him on the screen. Woody surprises me all the time. On film, you see his neurotic side but not his sensi­ti­vity.” I read to Johansson a recent quote from Allen, that she has “a tiny bit of Marilyn Monroe in her zaftig humidity.” Johansson waits two beats and then laughs a naughty laugh that would have done Mae West proud. “My goodness,” she says. As that great lady herself once said, “Goodness has nothing to do with it.”

- Check out the november issue of Elle, on newsstands now, for the full story on Scarlett Johansson.