Asked for her opinion on the mysterious moniker, Scarlett Johansson made her distaste clearScarlett Johansson at the world premiere of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ July 8. Photo:
Michael Loccisano/WireImage
Scarlett Johansson doesn’t seem to care for a certain nickname that was mysteriously bestowed upon her.
When asked to confirm or deny various facts about her in a July 13 New York Times profile, the 39-year-old star appeared to agree with the assertion, “You don’t like the nickname ScarJo.”
“I want to know who started it,” the Oscar nominee said simply in response.
It’s unclear when or how Johansson, who shot to superstar status around 2003 upon the release of Sofia Coppola’s Bill Murray film Lost in Translation, earned the moniker.
In 2011, she told USA Today she found it “awful,” per HuffPost. “It’s a laziness,” Johansson said at the time. “People can’t actually say the whole name? It’s just bizarre… so Cate Blanchett is not, like, ‘CaBla’? Why is that? Why do I have to get stuck with [ScarJo]?”
In 2014, in a cover interview with Glamour, she reiterated the point: “I associate that name with, like, pop stars. It sounds tacky. It’s lazy and flippant. And there’s something kind of violent about it. There’s something insulting about it.”
Now starring opposite Channing Tatum in Fly Me to the Moon (in theaters now), Johansson admitted to disliking several other things in her New York Times interview. She confirmed a “morbid fear of birds,” saying, “I just think maybe the wings, the flapping of the wings, and the sharp claws and beaks, and the jerky movements. I don’t like any of that.”
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The mother of two also admitted she prefers attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner to the Oscars, and would “take NASA over SpaceX any day.”
Fly Me to the Moon is in theaters now. Johansson will also feature as one of the voices in Transformers One (in theaters Sept. 20) and is in production on Jurassic World 4.