Do we like Scarlett Johansson?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record with one contested loyalty and one badly handled trans casting row that she later owned up to.
Johansson was a child actor who grew into one of the biggest stars going. Woody Allen's films Match Point, Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona helped make her an A-lister. Then came a decade as Black Widow for Marvel, which is where her biggest fight with a studio came from.
In 2018 she was cast to play Dante Tex Gill, a trans man, in Rub & Tug. A representative's first reply pointed critics to the reps of cisgender actors who had played trans characters, and it did not go down well. She pulled out and said she understood why many feel the part should go to a trans performer. She later called her first response insensitive, and that is a fair way to handle it.
The Woody Allen loyalty is the bigger mark. In 2019 she told The Hollywood Reporter that Allen maintains his innocence and that she would “I believe him, and I would work with him anytime.” His adult daughter has made child abuse allegations against him. Allen has never been criminally charged. Plenty of people read that as an uncomfortable stance for someone who backed Time's Up.
In 2014 she quit as an Oxfam ambassador rather than give up her paid SodaStream gig. Oxfam said the role was incompatible with hers. She said she remained a supporter of economic cooperation between a democratic Israel and Palestine. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a business deal or as a political statement.
On the harm test, there's no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women or the planet in what turned up. She fought OpenAI over a ChatGPT voice she said sounded eerily like hers. OpenAI denied copying her. In 2025 she said an AI video using her likeness was circulating in response to antisemitism and urged Washington to act on AI laws.
Her recent work is clean on the company-she-keeps check. She directed Eleanor the Great, backed by Wayfarer Studios, which Justin Baldoni co-founded. She said Wayfarer were supportive and that the timing was weird, given that Blake Lively had filed a harassment complaint against Baldoni, which he has denied. Next up are Paper Tiger and Ari Aster's Scapegoat.