9:53 A.M. THURSDAY, STUDIO 1A, ROCKEFELLER CENTER—“Seven minutes to the fourth hour!” Speakers erupt inside the TODAY show studio, calling for the fill-in co-host to get to the anchor desk. Inside Scarlett Johansson’s dressing room, her glam team and assistant scroll on their phones. There is no sign of the actor. She’s still in a meeting with show producers. But right on time, Johansson will sit down with host Jenna Bush Hager and reveal on live television that she was once ghosted and dumped. She and Hager will get their ears pierced while holding hands. She will be asked if she likes mayonnaise. She will, with her inimitable, vocal-fry-alto voice, admit she likes Blues Traveler. Then, during a commercial break, she will race up a narrow staircase to a 30-square-foot kitchen. 

Scarlett Johansson is making chicken wings on live television. That’s a fairly absurd sentence, but it’s reality. I’m watching Johansson’s last day as the guest host on TODAY with Jenna & Friends—a gambit of revolving famous faces following longtime star Hoda Kotb’s departure from the show on January 10. A chef from Queens BBQ joint Pig Beach is next to her doing the rapid-fire-morning-show-how-to thing. It could have been a rote moment on American television. If, of course, one of the hosts wasn’t Scarlett Fucking Johansson.

She’s into it. The sleeves of her oversized blazer are rolled up. As I witness her genuine surprise at the addition of baking soda to the lemon pepper marinade, I have a realization: Johansson is The Last Old-Hollywood Actress Working Today. The voice, the face, the talent, the glamour, it combines to put her right there alongside Bacall, Garbo, Kelly, Hepburn, Hepburn. What’s more, Johansson possesses (until perhaps this very second?) something all too vital—and increasingly rare: a sense of mystery.

As the segment ends, she offers me a chicken wing. “You gotta try the lemon pep!” Then she races downstairs for a segment on “what the kids are saying.”

Johansson, 40, came to fame exclusively via films: Lost In Translation, Marriage Story, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Match Point, Ghost World. She had a very lucrative superhero turn. As Natasha Romanoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of only two female characters in the MCU to have her own stand-alone movie, Johansson ultimately saved the universe in Avengers: Endgame. (If you’re a Marvel geek like me, you’ll recall Black Widow sacrificing herself to acquire the Soul Stone on Vormir, which was a crucial step in allowing the Avengers to reverse Thanos’s devastating “snap.”) And, hey, she’s got the receipts: Johansson is the second-highest grossing actor of all time, with more than $14 billion worldwide. (If you want to be gendered about it, she’s the highest-grossing female. Only Samuel L. Jackson has a bigger box office.)

All of which naturally brings us to the dressing room door belonging to Hager, after the show. As we sidestep head-set-ed producers, rolling racks, and trays of tiny cupcakes, she tells me how she and Johansson met not too long ago at a dinner party and hit it off. “Then Scarlett was here as a guest after Hoda announced she was leaving,” Hager remembers, “and I asked her, ‘Would you ever come and guest host?’ And she said ‘100 percent.’”

Yeah, right. Johansson, so famously private that her husband made a joke about it at last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner (“Don’t be shy. Come right up. She hates privacy!”), sitting down for a solid week on mid-morning television to talk about kids, dating, and flower arranging? Surely you thought she was being polite, I ask Hager. “Of course! I was like, Is this real?” It was.

 “She’s intentional,” Hager says she’s come to realize. “Okay, and she wears cool clothes. Scarlett is an Avenger. But her badassery is not surpassed by her kindness and her generosity. It’s miraculous for somebody who’s been in this industry for so long, which can turn people…” Hager’s light Texan twang peters out with the ellipsis. “You know. Into not kind and generous. I keep being like, There’s some kind error, because you’re famous.”

2:12 P.M. THURSDAY, AN ANONYMOUS BUILDING ON MADISON AVENUE—  A few blocks east of the TODAY show studio, Johansson sits cross-legged on the floor. Glasses on, her T.V. makeup off, hair pulled back in a ponytail, she’s in the middle of a square of softly lit glass offices, the plush headquarters of her production company, These Pictures. The lack of overhead lighting, neutral tones, and whispering quiet give the office a spa vibe. She’s speaking to her partner, Jonathan Lia, about the possible release date of her directorial debut, titled Eleanor the Great and starring the 95-year-old June Squibb. As I sit down, the conversation turns to who should sit next to Hager on the show permanently. Despite social media reaction to her turn that week, it won’t be Johansson.

“I think with Hoda, it was so great because she was like, you know, a little older, but with kids.” She was a mentor, Johansson says. “She was a little step ahead.” Johansson agrees the new co-host should be spicy. “Jenna needs to be with someone funny.”

“[Co-hosting] TODAY really is a fantasy job for me,” Johansson says, moving from the floor to the sofa. “I like every element of that job, because I love talking to people. It’s not dissimilar from hosting Saturday Night Live in some ways.” Johansson is a member of the Five-Timers Club. “The live element of it is really fun. Spontaneous and a little dangerous too. I would never want my own TV show.”

But she’s developing one, Just Cause—an adaptation of the 1995 film (her second ever)—one of a handful of projects she’s overseeing at the moment. Johansson founded These Pictures in 2017. Its first project was last year’s Fly Me to the Moon, which she starred in alongside Channing Tatum.

She’s been in such a steady stream of movies that it’s easy to forget she was a child actor. “My work ethic comes from being on movie sets as a very young kid,” she says, starting with her first role, at age 8, as John Ritter’s daughter in North. “I was immediately making feature-length films. I worked with a lot of adults as a young person. My mom really instilled in me the importance of being respectful on set to the adults I was working with. And being prepared for work every day.”

With a production company, a directorial debut, a thriving acting career (next up: this summer’s Jurassic World: Rebirth), and two children (Rose, 10, her daughter with ex-husband Romain Dauriac; and Cosmo, 3, her son with husband Colin Jost),  Johansson’s vocational Venn diagram could appear chaotic. And we haven’t even mentioned her skin-care startup, The Outset, yet. “It’s understanding how to delegate,” she says. “I’ve gotten better at that with more experience. I am kind of a control freak. I have a very active mind. People always describe how they’re ‘zoned out’ and I’m not sure what that means.”

You should try it sometime, I suggest. She laughs. “I know.”

It helps that she has a support system who gets it. Johansson has been with Jost since 2017. The two met during one of Johansson’s appearances on Saturday Night Live, where he is, of course, the co-anchor of Weekend Update. And, on the day I’m with Johansson, the internet is buzzing about a very, and I mean very dirty joke made during the show’s annual, end-of-year joke swap. (Jost had just addressed it on The Tonight Show.) To close out the segment, co-anchor Michael Che had Jost read the following: “Costco has removed the roast beef sandwich from its menu. But I ain’t trippin’. I’ve been eating roast beef every night since my wife had the kid.” The SNL audience reacted with gasps as the camera cut to Johansson, jaw-dropped, backstage.

“It was so vulgar,” Johansson says. “I just can’t believe that they went there. I was like—it was so gross. It was really gross.” She starts laughing. “And, like, old-school gross.”

She’s more than a good sport. “My experience of it was so funny.” Johansson was given a heads up by the producers that Che had written a “vagina joke.” Johansson did not think the vagina in question would belong to her. “I was like, I mean, it’s a vagina joke, how bad could it be? And then as soon as the Costco photo came up, I was like No! No, Michael!”

Johansson also found the pre-planned camera ambush of her dizzying. “The fact that it took on a full To Catch a Predator-style reveal or whatever,” she says with a laugh, referencing the Dateline series setups, “that was so intense. All of a sudden, it was like a whole bunch of people holding up lights, and a guy with a video camera.” She was surrounded. “They were waiting for me to react. I felt insane.” She had been at the studios all day. “I was like, I think I’m going to faint.”

She and Jost crawled into bed together at 4 o’clock that morning, laughing. “I was like, ‘My nerves are shot.’ And Colin said, ‘Me too.’” Little did they know, the internet would still be talking about the joke a month later. But, as it’s long been with Johansson, she wasn’t going to be talking back.

In 2022, Johansson launched The Outset, a clean-beauty company that, while founded by a celebrity, was not created to be a celebrity brand. The idea was to create products born out of a need to help her own skin, a startup so necessary (and accessible) that it could exist without her fame. And yet, Johansson having no social media presence was an obstacle. I point out that of the more than 30 celebrity-backed beauty brands I could find, she and Brad Pitt are the only founders without an Instagram handle.

“Well that’s weird,” she says, genuinely baffled.

The day before, her co-founder Kate Foster (who in the time between interview and publication resigned from the company) told me her first order of business upon coming on board was to get Johansson to join Instagram. How close did you get? I ask Johansson.

“I got close enough to talk to my therapist about it. I was like, I guess this is something I need to do. But it goes against my core values.” She laughs, but this is no joke. “I think it was more about: How do I express that, too? Because there’s so much expectation from…” She trails off.

She’s talking about the very nature of one-way, star-fan, parasocial relationships. In the golden age of Hollywood, that’s just how it was: Stars performed, audiences adored. Today, audiences expect some reciprocation. A small group of celebrities—Johansson, Pitt, Emily Blunt, George Clooney, Kristen Stewart, Tina Fey, and Jake Gyllenhaal among them—are keeping it old school. “I mean, even today, I got an email from Universal [Pictures], and they’re like, ‘Hey, would you consider joining Instagram in tandem with the release of Jurassic World: Rebirth?’ [I] get a lot of pressure to join social media.” It does make her think. “Is there a way I could do this and stay true to who I am? It didn’t feel like I could.” Another laugh.

It’s not as though she doesn’t see the potential from a business angle. Lately, she has been appearing more on The Outset’s Instagram feed—tutorials with products. “I’m totally there. It’s funny and fun and minimally invasive.” When The Outset launched their first lip product last year, with an intriguingly shaped applicator (“There was a vibrator phase,” she quips), Johansson surprised the company by filming herself applying it from the backseat of a cab in London. I watch as she recalibrates into Founder Scarlett before me.

“It’s a great product. It’s different looking. The formulation is different than a lot of stuff that’s out there. The slick of it is different. It has our Hyaluroset Complex in it. Right? So, it’s giving clinically proven moisture to your lips and changes the texture of your lips in four weeks. But also, that, coupled with the fact that it’s a recognizable part of me, you see, okay, there’s potential for us to hit with that.”

I see her wrestling with the algebra of it all: Instagram, her very genetic characteristics, what fans demand today, her desire to create something more tangible. “The work that I put out there is all based in truth. That’s the key ingredient. So if I was a person who really enjoyed social media, then I could totally get on the bandwagon. But I’m not. And I think the film will do fine.”

4:15 P.M. WEDNESDAY, FLATIRON DISTRICT— Past a tiny lobby, up a rumbling elevator, and through an inconspicuous door are the offices of The Outset, the skin-care company built around the idea of offering natural alternatives for sensitive skin. Inside sit the nine employees of the three-year-old company. As I walk across the creaky wooden floors, I pause at a shelf with a few of The Outset’s best-selling products—the Botanical Barrier Rescue Balm, Lip Oasis, and Firming Vegan Collagen Prep Serum. I turn around and find a life-sized cutout of Johansson in a pink Prada column dress, from the red carpet premiere of Asteroid City in 2023. It feels less shrine, more tongue-in-cheek—“Look at the boss!”

Like a lot of people, Foster first committed the name Scarlett Johansson to memory when she watched Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola’s turn-of-the-millennium elegy to the loss of time slash ode to deep talks when you’re upside down with jet lag, starring Johansson and Bill Murray. But Foster became a fan when she saw her on SNL.

“I was like, ‘Oh, she’s funny,’” Foster says, closing her laptop. We’re sitting in a typical conference room with an atypical ornate glass-top table and gold undulating chairs—previously Johansson’s dining room set, I learn. “She just wasn’t just a beautiful young It Girl, you know?”

She notes that Johansson arrived at their collaboration with a powerful résumé.  “She’s been working in a high-stakes professional environment since she was 8 years old,” says Foster. “I’ve seen such a tapestry of experiences coming from her. Like her personal experience of struggling with sensitive skin, acne prone skin, and what has worked for her, and wanting to bring those solutions to the customer through The Outset. It’s a very authentic pain point.”

“But,” adds Joanne Chiu Sulit, the company’s chief marketing officer, who joined the company two days before it launched, Johansson’s “design was never to just create a brand that was based on her persona.” This is not Goop—and they all love and respect Goop, by the way. “There’s [a reason] it was not called Scarlett Johansson Skin Care; it’s called The Outset,” says Sulit. “This is definitely not a cash grab.”

We all know the marketplace. Fenty Beauty (Rihanna), Rare Beauty (Selena Gomez), Kylie Cosmetics (Kylie Jenner), Keys Soulcare (Alicia Keys), Rhode (Hailey Bieber), About Face (Halsey), and JLo Beauty (Jennifer Lopez). There are myriad ways celebrities build beauty businesses. Many have gone through incubators or accelerators, where they join an already established company with already established infrastructure. “Like a licensing [deal on] steroids,” Sulit says. “Scarlett explored those paths but she wanted to found something and grow it. This is truly a startup.”

I wonder if she means the coat rack of puffer coats, the employees wearing Apple AirPods Max headphones, the hissing radiator, or the box of half-eaten Entenmann’s Apple Cider donuts. Maybe the map with tacks scattered across the United States representing markets they’ve entered.

The company started in the dark days of the pandemic. Look, a lot of people had their Covid projects, but this was not sourdough bread. Products were passed back and forth via FedEx. Lots of Zooming. This is version one of the prep serum. This is version two. This is the one that has more of X ingredient, less of Y.

The Outset launched in March 2022 with five products, all priced under $55—somewhere between Cetaphil and Dr. Barbara Sturm—with the heart of the offerings being the three-step process inspired by Johansson’s own daily routine.

Chapter One was skepticism around the Hollywood association. Does the world really need another celebrity beauty brand? But then people tried it. “We entered our ‘actually’ period,” Sulit says. Well, actually these products are really good. Well, actually my skin has never been better. She recalls a story in The Cut on celebrity beauty brands that reviewed The Outset. “It was like, ‘Everybody else’s stuff is actually crap, but we were all pleasantly surprised that this stuff actually works.’ I love being an underdog, one that blows the competition away.” Then came the best part: Repeat purchases. “It happened quickly,” Sulit says. “And so it was not this flash in the pan, where people are kind of one-and-done. We have a swath of people that are on subscriptions. It could be Scarlett that brings them in, but when they’re using the products, they’re coming back for them. And that’s when you know you have a business.”

I ask Sulit what the goal is. She’s quick to answer: For every bathroom to have The Outset in it.

“The thing that I admire the most about Scarlett,” she continues, “is that she has a vision; she trusts her gut. And, honestly, it’s very rare if a celebrity is involved that they are actually as involved as Scarlett is.” I hear she cleans out drawers, I say. “Yes, that, or she’ll be cleaning the dishes. Or she’s telling us, ‘Oh, there needs to be a proper first aid kit in here.’ She mothers the office.” Her very enviable skin certainly doesn’t hurt business either.

12:45 P.M. WEDNESDAY, 41st STREET, MIDTOWN MANHATTAN— On the day of our cover shoot, Johansson is taking us through her handbag. 

“Oh, orange Tic Tacs. These are delicious. I love them. I like all Tic Tacs, but I particularly like the orange ones because they’re sort of like a little treat. You know? You can’t have just one. You have to have two. And, like, whether you suck on them or you kind of crunch them. I gave one of these to my 3-year-old son the other day, who had never had them before, and he was in the back of the car, and he went, ‘Mmm these are good. Can I have another one?’ They’re so delicious. I don’t know if they’re really helping your breath at all, but they’re definitely good for your belly.”

3:17 P.M. THURSDAY, AN ANONYMOUS BUILDING ON MADISON AVENUE— Back at These Pictures HQ, I’ve asked Johansson about something she isn’t always so comfortable talking about: the profound effect she’s had on Hollywood by standing up for herself. First, in a 2021 settlement with Disney, over streaming rights and residuals after her film Black Widow was released on Disney+. Johansson claimed the move breached her contract and deprived her of potential earnings. The litigation affected how talent could be compensated in the era of streaming (and the shrinking of theaters). Then, in May 2024, OpenAI debuted a new Chatbot voice. It sounded a whole lot like Johansson, who, the public did not know, had, in fact, been asked to voice the system, but declined. Johansson says she found out from a friend of Jost’s, who texted him: “Hey this sounds a lot like Scarlett.” OpenAI, following Johansson’s legal action, discontinued the use of the “Sky” voice. (A couple weeks after our interview, Johansson’s likeness was used, along with many other celebrities’, in a deep fake video condemning Kanye West’s antisemitism.)

“My therapist always says—that’s the second time I’ve mentioned my therapist,” Johansson says, rolling her eyes, “‘We’re always more human than otherwise.’ Particularly with the A.I. piece. It was like: If that can happen to me, how are we going to protect ourselves from this? There’s no boundary here; we’re setting ourselves up to be taken advantage of.”

Whether for streaming rights or AI, Johansson was not, and is not, interested in being a permanent spokesperson. But she’s going to speak up and out when she feels she must. Then, as is usually her M.O., gets out of the way.

“I don’t need to be beating the drum the whole time,” she says. “That’s not my place. But, also, I’m not afraid of being invalidated. For certain things, particularly with the streamer residual piece, when the industry is in the process of this huge shift, that bubble eventually had to burst. I guess the bubble popped with me in a way.”

She continues: “I’m fortunate enough to have been working for such a long time, and not that long ago felt settled with where I am in my career.” She says she, not so long ago, lived feast or famine. “Like every single actor working, I had this constant fear that everything would go away. Or that every movie would be my last. I am still the 8-year-old kid just waiting to get another part. But now I see that actually I built something that… that I have a place here. And because of that, I’ve been able to stand up for myself and not feel like I would disappear. I can shoulder it.”

She does seem more open today, than she has been previously, I say to her. She nods. She sees what we see: the TODAY show, the laughs with Jost, The Outset videos. “But if anyone knows me, I definitely over-share. I’m not a closed book, you know?” It’s not a Garbo thing, we joke. “No. I’m politically active and vocal about it. But I am a private person in the sense that I value my close friendships. My family is very precious to me, as is their privacy. The anonymity of my children is very precious to me. I was talking to my daughter the other day, because she said, ‘Oh, I would love to make videos for The Outset.’” I watch Johansson relive this moment. “She was like, ‘Why can’t I?’ And I said, ‘Well, other than the fact that you’re 10…’”

Johansson found herself explaining the irrevocable nature of fame. “The thing about being a public figure is that the idea of being recognizable and celebrated feels fun, but then you can never stuff it back in the bottle. The reality of it is, there’s a massive loss to that, you know? So I think preserving that for as long as possible until it’s someone’s choice, that’s the choice I make as far as my kids go.” She says she wants to move around the world as she wishes. “I want to go and buy my own shit at Duane Reade.”

Johansson has long had a policy: She does not take photos with fans if she’s not at an event. “It really offends a lot of people. It doesn’t mean I’m not appreciative, of course, that people are fans, or happy to see me. But I always say to people, ‘I’m not working.’ [And that means] I don’t want to be identified as being in this time and place with you. I’m doing my own thing.” As for movie premieres or at the TODAY show, she says, well, that’s when she is working.

“I like to be in my own thoughts that have nothing to do with what other people think of me,” she says quietly. “I don’t like being self-conscious.” Johansson tells me that, after reading a piece on Chappell Roan, she found herself relating to her, and that gave her a new level of empathy. “Like everybody else, I fell in love with her over the summer. She’s very outspoken about how hard it’s been to adjust to fame.” As Johansson has witnessed the fervor around the pop fame of Roan, it reminded her of another fame category. “It’s like heartthrobs. That’s hard. When I was younger, I dated actors that had heartthrob status. That is, to me, scary. I don’t have that level. Fan crush-dom can be really hard.”

She busts into a belly laugh. “Men have it so hard. That’s the headline of this story.”

Her co-star in Jurassic World: Rebirth is a man with significant heartthrob status, Jonathan Bailey. (“He uses The Outset,” she says, “he’s very good with his face. He’s getting all his facials and steaming or whatever.”) Making it into the Jurassic universe has been a goal of Johansson’s for most of her career.

“I saw the first one when I was, like, 11. And it looked like nothing we’d ever seen before. I remember it so clearly. The music, the Brontosaurus, the whole thing. The first time that T-Rex screamed, oh my God, it was transcendent.”

This fall, another near-lifelong goal achieved: directing her own feature film. Johansson describes Eleanor the Great as small. “It’s like a little gem. I was inspired by those independent films from the mid-80s to the mid-2000s. Living Out Loud. Crossing Delancey. Moonstruck.” She was deeply satisfied by stretching creatively. “When I would get home from work, and I would say to Colin, ‘You know, it’s so exciting to be 40 and learn a new thing. Now I know how to make a movie like this. I know how to finish it. The process of sound mixing and coloring and editing—I didn’t know that before. And now I know how to do it.”

More meetings beg for Johansson’s attention. I’ve been here for almost two hours, sitting in the middle of her creative brain trust. “There are certainly days where I’m like, ‘What have I taken on?’ It’s just so much. It’s a beast that has to keep getting fed. I mean, both of these ventures,”—The Outset and this office—“are very expensive, right? I have put a lot of investment into them. It can feel like there’s a ticking clock and I’m running out of time. And I have to keep pushing it up the mountain and then pushing it up the mountain. It’s never like, ‘Oh, we’ve made it.’ It’s more, ‘We ran out of our Lip Oasis, and we need to get more in, in a week.’” She says she’s constantly forecasting, trying to divine the future. Yes, the self-diagnosed control freak wants to remain in control. “There’s a lot of risk-reward happening.” Johansson is, after all, a mere mortal. But, like Black Widow, still an Avenger with extraordinary skills.

Speaking of, you gotta let it go. “Natasha is dead. She is dead. She’s dead. Okay?” She knows what you Marvel fans are chirping. “They just don’t want to believe it. They’re like, ‘But she could come back!’ Look, I think the balance of the entire universe is held in her hand. We’re going to have to let it go. She saved the world. Let her have her hero moment.”