Scarlett Johansson: Sexiest Woman Alive (twice)

In the movie she has out right now, Don Jon, she plays the hot, manipulative girlfriend of a porn addict. She makes a hootchie girl elegant, offering ascendant beauty in every scene. Hers is an unstressed beauty, which may be why her look is so mutable, more slender than buxom and fleshy.

Scarlett Johansson & Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "Don Jon" (2013)

Her next movie is Under the Skin, a horror film in which she plays a flesh-tearing supernatural wandering across Scotland. In this bar today, she does not look like that horny Catholic in Don Jon for a dozen reasons you already know: She's wiped out from the photo shoot, wearing no makeup, different shoes, different bra, and so on.


"I'm exhausted and this is my last day in the world," she says, sunglasses off now. "This is the last day, and this is the last piece of work. Then I'm taking a month-long vacation. But I'm not going anywhere, which just makes it more of a staycation. There's luxury in being near home. When you spend a lot of time, like I do, just standing around and waiting, or being moved from place to place, every minute gets consumed by something someone else has set up for you. And it's not like I'm always in a beautiful place wearing something gorgeous. I've stood around bogs wearing half a million dollars' worth of jewelry, up to my knees in the rot, thinking how much more or less the place smelled like a sewer than it did the day before. And that is not what you'd call a problem exactly; it just wears you out. What I want to do right now is sleep late, read the paper. I've come to see that there's something pretty great about having two hours to read."

Why accept the title Sexiest Woman Alive if everything is so busy just now? Here, she shrugs. "I'm the only woman to win it twice, right?" she says.

"So it's okay, even if you have no reason to be jealous?" I ask. "Look, I'm with a Frenchman. I think jealousy comes with the territory. But I'd rather be with someone who's a little jealous than someone who's never jealous. There's something a little dead fish about them. A little bit depressing. It may not make sense, but you need to feel it a little. I know, irrational, right?" She sips water and thinks. "I didn't think I was a jealous person," she says, "until I started dating my current, my one-and-only. I think maybe in the past I didn't have the same kind of investment. Not that I liked my partner less, I just wasn't capable of it or caring that much."

Scarlett Johansson & Josh Hartnett in "The Black Dahlia" (2006)

Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson in "We Bought a Zoo" (2011)

I can muster only this: "Do you like wearing sunglasses?" To which I add: "I guess you'd have to." Brilliant. "Oh," she says, emphasizing the Oh before she looks away. She lifts and drops the glasses in place on the bridge of her nose. "I do. I have sensitive eyes. The light really gets me." She looks out to the sea, across the road and over a dune, as if testing things. I believe she sighed then, but I can't really say. What she said: "There's that. And, well, you know. I have to live behind them, because I'm a movie star." She lifts an eyebrow, acknowledging the simple truth of it. It's her trademark I-dare-you glance. Then, with some lip-pursing and a calculated shrug, she pinches her eye and mutters, just like some old guy making sandwiches in his kitchen apron, "Whatta you gonna do?" Source: www.esquire.com