Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow Was Written As 'Over-Sexualized' At First, Actress Says

Scarlett Johansson is revisiting the early days of her career.

During an appearance on the "Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi" podcast, the 38-year-old Oscar nominee, who starred in "Lost in Translation" and "Girl with a Pearl Earring" in her teenage years, revealed that for a while she felt "stuck" in one place in her career because she continuously found herself playing the object of male desire during a point in her life when she was coming to terms with her womanhood and cultivating her star power in Hollywood.

While discussing how she felt "kind of groomed" into being "a bombshell-type of actor," Johansson reminded listeners that even her Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow role in Robert Downey Jr.'s "Iron Man 2," which was released in 2010, was written as "underdeveloped and over-sexualized" at first, according to Variety.

According to the actress, she worked with director Jon Favreau and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige to re-work the spy and assassin character into something more progressive.

"I got this incredible opportunity to work in the second 'Iron Man,' which that part at the time was very underdeveloped and over-sexualized, but I wanted to form a relationship with Jon Favreau who I worked with a couple of times after that, who's an inspiration for me," she was quoted as saying on the podcast by The Hollywood Reporter. "And I also wanted to work with Kevin Feige, who's the head of Marvel, who I knew had a vision for this big picture."

It wasn't the first time Johansson opened up about her character Black Widow being sexualized in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Ahead of the release of her standalone "Avengers" franchise film, "Black Widow," last year, she told Collider in an interview: "You look back at 'Iron Man 2' and while it was really fun and had a lot of great moments in it, the character is so sexualized, you know?"

"Really talked about like she's a piece of something, like a possession or a thing or whatever — like a piece of a--, really. And Tony [Downey] even refers to her as something like that at one point. What does he say? 'I want some,'" the actress continued.

Johansson said Tony Stark a.k.a Iron Man even referred to her character as a "piece of meat" at one point, which she admitted "maybe at that time ... actually felt like a compliment" because her "thinking was different" back then.

She also spoke about being "objectified" when she appeared on the "Armchair Expert" podcast in October. She admitted that her constant "hyper-sexualization" in the industry made her feel that her career was ending because she was not getting offers for movie roles that she wanted to do.

"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 explained. "I remember thinking to myself, 'I think people think I'm 40 years old.' It somehow stopped being something that was desirable and something that I was fighting against."

She continued, "I think everybody thought I was older and that I'd been [acting] for a long time, I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hyper-sexualized thing. I felt like [my career] was over. 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?'"

Johansson is set to appear in Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City." It will be released in June 2023.