Singer, model, actress . . . however you categorise Scarlett Johansson just don’t call her “ScarJo”. She hates it.
Johansson has said she finds the nickname insulting and wants her fans to stop using it.
“I associate that name with, like, pop stars,” Johansson has told Glamour magazine.
“It sounds tacky. It’s lazy and flippant . . . There’s something insulting about it.”
The 29-year-old Lost in Translation star appears on the May cover of Glamour, photographed by Tom Munro, and unloads her hatred of the nickname inside.
But it isn’t the first time the A-lister has complained about “ScarJo”. In 2011 Johansson told USA Today that she found the moniker “awful”.
“It’s a laziness,” she said. “People can’t actually say the whole name It’s just bizarre . . . So Cate Blanchett is not, like, ‘CaBla’ Why is that Why do I have to get stuck with [ScarJo]”
And it’s not the only label the actress wants to shake.
Voted sexiest woman alive by Esquire magazine in 2013, and praised for her role in Lost in Translation, Johansson has struggled to achieve recognition for her body of work. She says she was 17 when she made Lost in Translation and has been “in her early twenties for over a decade”.
“That’s a normal side effect of being a young actor,” she tells Glamour. “You’re captured in a certain time of your life and it’s hard for people to move past that.”
The actress also opens up about her divorce from actor Ryan Reynolds, four years after their split.
Bouncing back from the divorce, she says “I think I know myself better. I feel I know now more of what I need in a relationship, what I want in a relationship. And I know I have more tools to communicate, not just with my partner but with myself.
“That’s not necessarily any reflection of who I was married to or what was happening in my marriage, but really where I was in my life.”
Now Johansson is entering a new stage in life, expecting her first child with fiance Romain Dauriac, a French journalist.
The couple splits their time between New York and Paris, and Johansson says she enjoys the Parisian lifestyle.
“I guess part of the wonderful thing about living in Paris is how people take their time with things. And I like to feel no pressure on the weekends in Paris. Sunday, most things are closed in Paris, and there’s something wonderful about that.”
Life in Paris has made Johansson more style conscious too.
“The nice thing about being in Paris is that you know everybody’s looking at what you’re wearing: you have an audience, you know
“New York is about street style that’s functional. A Paris look is not functional! It doesn’t matter if your shoes are comfortable. Here [in New York] you can still wear your Nikes. In Paris you suck it up. You hobble around.”
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However, Johansson says she and her friends are bringing streetwear back.
“I am sick of not feeling my big toe after two hours of dancing,” she says.
Johansson also appears on the May cover of Vanity Fair and is promoting two new movies, Captain Amer-ica: The Winter Soldier and art-house alien film Under the Skin.
In response to Johansson’s request to stop calling her “ScarJo”, the Huffington Post wrote: “Dearest Ms Johansson, on behalf of the media, please trust us when we say the nickname is not meant to be insulting in the least. Think about the other celebrities whose names are given such treatment: KStew, RPatz, the Biebs, SelGo.”
– FFX Aus
