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SCARLETT JOHANSSON spent so much time talking herself out of appearing in this season’s acclaimed Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “View From the Bridge” that she ultimately talked herself into it.
She had no particular trepidation about making her first stage appearance since a one-line role in an Off Broadway play (“Sophistry” at Playwrights Horizons) when she was not yet a teenager. After all, Ms. Johansson, who dreamed of a career in musical theater while growing up in Greenwich Village, had been considering appearing on Broadway for a few years now. But at the advanced age of 25 she was worried about playing a girl of 17.
“I am so wary of older actors playing teenage characters,” she said over herbal tea in the garden at the Chateau Marmont here a few days after the announcement of her Tony Award nomination for best featured actress in a play, one of six for the show. “It’s actually a pet peeve of mine.”
Looking springtime fresh in gingham and shorts, her only makeup a colorless gloss on the lush lips that have probably launched a thousand ill-conceived trips to the plastic surgeon, Ms. Johansson could easily pass for 17 today. But it’s the emotional maturity, not the character’s physical age, that gave her pause. “Being 17 is a very particular thing,” she said. “You’re ripe, and all is ahead of you. Life is about to happen to you at that age. A lot has happened to me since I was 17.”
Certainly. Things like critical acclaim for film roles in Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” and Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” four Golden Globe nominations and, of course, the appurtenances of career (publicists, agents, managers) and adjustments of daily life that come with acquiring a level of celebrity that makes your every trip to Starbucks a potential unwanted photo opportunity.
“I was expressing all this to a friend,” she recalled: “ ‘Can you believe they want me to play this young girl? It’s impossible, right?’ But as I was lamenting it and talking about writing it off, describing to my friend the particular feeling of being that age, he stopped me and said, ‘It sounds like you’ve got a solid grip on the character.’ ”
Indeed she did. The steady stream of Hollywood stars returning to (or making first forays into) the theater has been a phenomenon bemoaned both by critics who have watched as star casting has become the only reliable draw at the Broadway box office and by working theater actors who see fewer chances at landing significant roles.
Just when the hand wringing was reaching a maximum last fall with Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman having broken box-office records for the negligible play “A Steady Rain” and Jude Law packing them in to see his histrionic “Hamlet” Ms. Johansson’s forceful, intelligent and moving performance opposite Liev Schreiber in Miller’s common-man tragedy became a modest game changer, or at least a shutter-upper of the determined naysayers. (All right, I’ll admit I was probably one of the louder carpers.)
Onstage she was vibrant and natural, but the performance went beyond a charismatic portrait of innocence to reveal far more delicate nuances as the affection her character held for the uncle who had raised her became poisoned by suspicion and guilt and fear.
Gregory Mosher, who is also nominated for a Tony for directing the production, had put Ms. Johansson at the top of his list when casting the role. After sitting down with her for a couple of meetings and introducing her to Mr. Schreiber, his confidence in her ability to make the transition to the stage was secure. “I knew that voice would carry,” he said. “It’s not a squeaky little Valley Girl voice. On film you can see she’s alive in the moment at every second. The rest of it knowing how to animate your body I knew she’d pick up.”
The process, from his point of view, was almost without speed bumps. “It was like throwing Michael Phelps in the water,” he said succinctly. “She was fearless.”
She was not entirely. “Of course I was riddled with weird anxiety and compulsions,” she said. “I never studied theater and was unfamiliar with the terminology.”
“And this show is a little toxic,” she added, referring to the dark, tempestuous mixture of emotions that gradually colors her character’s reaction to the man she has always thought of as her bedrock.
“The hardest thing was figuring out how to relate to the audience,” she continued. “The audience is another force in the room. That was exhilarating and challenging. They are a part of the energy of the play. I had a hard time letting them in. It changed when Michael Cristofer” another cast member “turned to me one day and said, ‘You have to let them see your face.’ ”
That face the creamy skin, delicately arched brows and clear eyes that, peculiarly, remained walled off behind smoky sunglasses throughout the interview, the only movie star tic noticeable grew more animated the more Ms. Johansson discussed the rewards of her first experience on Broadway.
“I love film and acting for the camera,” she said. “But the idea of working on something that you owned every night was so appealing. In some sense in film your performance doesn’t really belong to you. It belongs to the director and the editor and the producers. Onstage what the audience saw was everything you had, not some reshaped version of it.
“The same arc was there every night, of course, and yet it changed and was a living, breathing thing. Every performance was like doing a new Rubik’s Cube.”
The other particularly rewarding aspect of her experience was that fabled sense of family that is said sentimentally and truthfully to be what keeps actors coming back to the theater even when more lucrative work beckons.
“I have to say that the kind of support and encouragement and creative critique and just, like, the wellspring of ideas and artistic juices a terrible term but it’s true that you get working in the rehearsal room and then onstage night after night was incredible,” she said. “I’ve never had that experience. I’ve had wonderful work relationships on film, but the kind of family you form and the elements that spring from that really touched me.”
Ms. Johansson, who is married to the actor Ryan Reynolds and still mostly makes her home in New York, seemed genuinely excited even 17-year-old-girlishly excited about attending the Tony Awards with her collaborators. “Maybe we’ll all wear purple T-shirts,” she joked, “like families at Disneyland.”
She said she hadn’t committed to a new project of any kind she’s currently on-screen in “Iron Man 2” though she sounded excited about returning to film work, which has its attractions. (When asked what she missed while working onstage, she joked: “The lack of craft services. Shocking!”)
But there’s no question that she has been smitten by the stage. The famous eight-a-week grind did get to her at times: “When we finished, I did feel like I’d run a marathon. I was a little battered.”
Even so, she added: “I guess it’s kind of like having a baby. You forget the nausea and morning sickness and the labor pains. After a while all you remember is the chemical reaction within you, that euphoria and the bonding endorphins.”
“Now I’m there,” she said, flashing a final blazing smile. “All I can think about is having the next one.”