Eye-popping ..
. Match Point star Scarlett Johansson admits her breasts are 'the stars of the film, really'.
Photo: Reuters
What are the rules about breasts?
of them, so long as the lady in question has left sufficient buttons undone and you don't get caught.
In England, the general rule is that you pretend staunchly that you didn't notice anything at all, except if they're on page 3 of them to your wall, in selected workplaces.
And the interview is in England.
But Scarlett Johansson is American. So how soon is too soon, in a formal interview situation, to congratulate her on her breasts?
It's tricky, because Johansson is no ordinary double-D cheesecake.
At only 21, she's already one of the most interesting and versatile actors of her generation. Her new film, directed by the fallible genius Woody Allen, displays bountiful evidence of her professional ability.
It also displays to eye-popping effect, however, the parts of Johansson that irrefutably identify her as a mammal.
I found, watching a screening of the film, that I couldn't keep my eyes off them.
And now, as we face each other over a table at London's ritzy Dorchester Hotel, they hover - literally and figuratively - between us, as yet unmentioned. With all the stealth of a spotty teenager oblivious date's seat at the movies, I ask her whether she enjoyed playing a bombshell, a sex symbol.
Then finally, her co-star Jonathan Rhys Meyers - who is in the room - opens the floodgates. "I've just got this image in my head of this film," he sniggers, slapping on a broad Australian accent: "She's got graaayyyyt tits, maaayyyte!"
"Yeah, well, you know," acknowledges the lady with a beatific smile, "they're the stars of the film, really.
"
Thank God.
"They should each get an Academy Award," I cannot help saying. featuring Rhys Meyers, a wheat field, pelting rain, Johansson's two Rhys Meyers: "Academy award?
They should get their own Rhys Meyers: "A minor supporting role?"
Johansson: "In terms of my upper body, and my posture. A balancing role.
"
It's not only interviewers and English people, apparently, who perfections. Johansson herself, she volunteers, once nearly crashed the background," she says, ruefully.
"It was for The Island actually, and they had printed the kind of advertising.
It had Ewan McGregor on it, maybe, and maybe it was me, but I definitely could tell it was my humungous cleavage."
Rhys Meyers interjects, helpfully: "They should have called it collarbones. Nor that in Nola, the pouting American bombshell she dramatic repertoire.
In her coming films, she will be seen playing an Amazon warrior queen, the principal character in a film version of The Nanny Diaries, and Lucrezia Borgia.
Allen, having cast her in Match Point after an eleventh-hour withdrawal by Kate Winslet, is hugely enamoured of the young star and, thrilled with her performance, smartly cast her in another film.
"She's irresistible, has a wonderful personality, and she's a tremendous actress," enthused Allen on completion of filming.
far advanced as an actress and sophisticated as a person."
As an actress, it's true that she displays an astoundingly precocious range. As a person, she comes across pretty much like a 21-year-old.
The low and throaty voice gives way to giggles fairly regularly, but generally then disciplines itself into devout, if slightly wooden, commentary about her craft. The word "like" infests her young American.
Point is her 22nd film and there are three more in the can, including Scoop, the next Woody Allen movie.
Her body of seduces her mother, played by Kristin Scott Thomas) to execrable (Home Alone 3, Eight Legged Freaks).
Much of this frenetic activity seems due to her mother, Melanie Johansson, who has a minor career as a producer and in fact will princess, which is due for release next year. Indeed, Johansson's twin brother Hunter, who is three minutes older than she, also has And while some of the films are dreadful, she has by dint of sheer different great directors.
1998, but only three years later she worked with the eccentric but and Billy Bob Thornton.
Two years later again, she starred in Lost In Oscars and turned Johansson into the thinking man's crumpet.
And about a year ago, she received a call: Would she come to London as soon as possible, please?
Woody Allen's latest film had lost its leading lady, Kate Winslet, at the last imaginable minute and a replacement was urgently needed. Was Johansson interested?
She was.
"I always wanted to work with Woody, and I have been watching his films since I was 10 years old, so he's always been one of the feel like 'Wow, he's got to want me', and I couldn't believe that my time had come, or that I would even get this opportunity.
"Of course, I agreed as soon as the words Woody Allen came out of my agent's mouth . .
. I'm just a huge fan. I did read the script out of curiosity, but it could have been any kind of story, really.
"
the two are an item, but both deny it), nearly passed out with excitement after getting the Allen call.
subsequent relationship with the Australian star Toni Collette, which disintegrated several years ago. His reference to the Sydney suburb of Blacktown is no accident; it's Collette's birthplace, and reminder "I used to go out with one of you nutters!
"
they meet any director, regardless of who it is. The fact that it's Woody Allen only amplifies it even more," he says.
"He was very very sweet, he was impersonal, but amiable, and the conversation lasted about two minutes.
He handed me a script and he said, 'I don't do much rehearsing. Let's work'. When Woody Allen says that to you, you kind of go, 'You know, that sounds like a authorities, which allowed him to film around the city's most recognisable landmarks.
Allen's script features Rhys Meyers as Chris, a struggling and club, thereby meeting the toffy but amiable Tom. With whose sister, Chloe, Chris more or less immediately falls in love. And with whose foxy fiancee, Nola (Johansson), he slightly-less-immediately begins a lusty liaison.
Which lands the film, as Allen devotees will swiftly recognise, in territory already explored by his 1989 masterpiece, Crimes And Misdemeanors. Torn between two women, Chris is forced to consider an alarming solution.
marks the completion, perhaps, of her transition from child star to sex symbol by way of a protracted and luminous adolescence.
"You know, it's hard to see outside of yourself," she says. "I don't know how people see me and I really don't care. I hope that I typecast as a neurotic bombshell.
"
The Black Dahlia co-star Josh Hartnett, but learned a great of her post-Oscars liaison with the snake-hipped Benicio Del Toro, who is 17 years her senior.
"They were little rumours," she says, rolling her eyes. "And I said something in an interview, like, 'yeah, apparently we were picked it up as saying we had sex in an elevator, leaving out the "So I learned, early on in my career, that being sarcastic doesn't always go over very well.
everything."
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