25 Former Female Child Stars Who Exposed The Dark Reality Of Hollywood

6. Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson has been candid about the ways she was exploited and typecast from a young age in Hollywood. The Black Widow star made her acting debut at just nine years old in the 1994 film North , but as she grew older, she found herself increasingly perceived as more mature than she actually was. During the milestone 500th episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman in 2022, Johansson reflected on how her early success and appearance led to her being “pigeonholed” into a hypers*xualized image that didn’t reflect her true personality. “I think everybody thought I was older, and I’d been acting for a long time, and then I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hypers*xualized thing,” she said. “It was like, that’s the kind of career you have. These are the roles you’ve played. And I was like, ‘This is it, I guess.’” Johansson acknowledged that while her mother worked hard to protect her, she still found herself in situations that were not age-appropriate as a young actress. She explained that her perceived maturity, rather than her actual behavior or identity, played a major role in how the industry treated her. Scarlett admitted that the experience was “scary” at the time, particularly because she was aware of how limited the shelf life is for women who are boxed into such roles in Hollywood. “I kind of became objectified and pigeonholed in this way where I felt like I wasn’t getting offers for work for things that I wanted to do,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘I think people think I’m, like, 40 years old.’ It somehow stopped being something that was desirable and became something I was fighting against.” Johansson also pointed out that she was frequently cast as characters older than herself, including at age 17 in the 2003 film Lost in Translation , where she played a character five years her senior, further reinforcing the industry’s skewed perception of her age and image. She concluded her reflections, adding, “I've come to this realization that it's important to understand progress and change when it's really meaningful. It takes two steps forward and two steps back, and then it gets better and then it gets worse.”