Dear Gossips, 

Scarlett Johansson covers the new issue of Vanity Fair. The timing works for several projects. She’ll be in Cannes next week for her feature directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, starring June Squibb. Jurassic World Rebirth opens on July 2, expected to be an Independence Day blockbuster. And she’s hosting the season 50 finale of Saturday Night Live tomorrow and there’s speculation that it will be her husband’s final episode as a cast member as it’s been heavily rumoured that Colin Jost is leaving his post. 

 

Michael Che actually joked about it on Instagram this week: 

Scarlett actually talks about Michael in her interview with Vanity Fair, referring to the moment during Weekend Update on an episode back in December where Colin and Michael take turns reading jokes they wrote for each other but haven’t seen – and this time Scarjo was backstage. The joke in question was epically disgusting and they had cameras on her to capture her reaction. Now that she’s returning to host, Scarjo promises that: 

“I feel like it’s almost my responsibility to come up with some way to burn Michael back. Retaliation, I’d say, should be expected. Others on the show could support this desire.” 

 

Jost and Che will for sure do their blind jokes thing tomorrow night – it’s a tradition now that they do on the last episode of the year and the season. It’ll be interesting to see what Scarjo comes up with. 

As for the rest of the interview, for me there are three highlights. Given her position in the business, at one point the highest paid actress in Hollywood, having successfully sued Disney as an Avenger, she’s in a unique position to be able to call out what the business has become and who has taken over. 

“Johansson last attended the Oscars five years ago, when she was a double nominee for her devastating turns in Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit. Back then, Hollywood’s resistance to Donald Trump remained voluble. Now he’s barely acknowledged at public events, including the Academy Awards. I ask what Johansson thinks of this shift, since before Trump’s reelection she’d called the idea of him becoming president again “unfathomable.” She reminds me of who attended Trump’s inauguration in January.

 

“These are people that are funding studios. It’s all these big tech guys that are funding our industry, and funding the Oscars, and so there you go,” Johansson says. “I guess we’re being muzzled in all these different ways, because the truth is that these big tech companies are completely enmeshed in all aspects of our lives.” How do you fight that? “I don’t know how you fight that,” she says, pointing to The Apprentice, the lightning rod Trump tale starring Sebastian Stan that most studios refused to touch. (It was acquired by the small distributor Briarcliff Entertainment and received two Oscar nominations.) “Here’s where you would go, ‘Okay, you can fight it by making stuff like that,’” she says. “But then what happened with the release? It was buried.”

I also appreciated the insight on her experience filming Lost in Translation. It’s no secret that Bill Murray wasn’t the easiest person to work with on that set – and on many sets. There are many people who’ve already spoken out about his behaviour, and he was called out in 2022 for inappropriate conduct. For Scarjo though, she was just 17 and living in Tokyo at the time, and Bill was such an energy suck on that set, she was left alone to figure it out. 

“Johansson was 17, living in Tokyo, and profoundly lonely. In the film she beautifully portrays an alienated recent college graduate who forms a tight bond with a gloomy American movie star played by Bill Murray. Art, in this case, did not imitate life. Johansson was a massive fan of Groundhog Day and What About Bob? from childhood but says of Lost in Translation, “Bill was in a hard place. Everybody was on tenterhooks around him, including our director and the full crew, because he was dealing with his…stuff.” She’d never encountered an actor in that kind of “headspace,” as she diplomatically puts it, and was left at sea. All eyes were on him; she could only look inward.”

 

It's a reminder of the emotional cost that others have to pay when someone drains the workplace battery. Probably all of us have had this experience – of working with someone who infects the office or the set with so much anxiety and there’s no support for anyone else. In Scarlett’s case, at such a young age, I’m not sure we talk enough about how that might have affected her and, at least for that phase of her career, informed her decisions and her own approach. 

 

And the final highlight from this Vanity Fair profile is the gossip. I wrote about this at our Substack, The Squawk, back in January in a piece about Scarjo’s expanded range when she co-hosted on Today with Jenna & Friends. She’s doing talk shows, she has a skincare brand, and she’s directing movies. Eleanor the Great was funded in part by Wayfarer Studios, Justin Baldoni’s company. He’s in a legal mess with Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who Scarjo used to be married to. And she is asked about this in Vanity Fair:

“Johansson never met Baldoni because he was busy making It Ends With Us, the source of his explosive legal battle with Blake Lively, who’s accused Baldoni of sexual harassment (he denies the allegations and is suing Lively for defamation, among other claims). When I bring up Baldoni, Johansson lets out a loud, knowing laugh. That’s the standard reaction these days, given how public the feud has become. “They were super supportive throughout the process,” she says of Wayfarer. “But yeah, such weird timing.”

 

Don’t you wish you could hear what the “loud, knowing laugh” sounded like and see her face while she was doing it to get a better sense of how she feels about the situation? 

Click here for the full feature in VF. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey