Scarlett Johansson on Being a Movie Star vs. Being an Actor | W Magazine

Patrick Swayze was my cinematic crush. I mean, obviously. He still is. Dirty Dancing was, like, such a formative, like, part of my youth. I think it was Patrick Swayze and David Bowie in Labyrinth when I was like, oh, sexuality. Like, it opened my eyes to, like, some other thing. I think Patrick Swayze and David Bowie both look great in extremely tight pants. I wanted to be Judy Garland when I was growing up. My mom is an enormous cinephile. I grew up with all movies of the golden age and musicals, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. I grew up watching movies from the 70s that my mom, you know, I mean, I must have seen them at way too young an age. You know, I was watching, like, Chinatown when I was, like, nine. No, I don't attempt any Judy Garland songs. I don't think I'm actually Judy Garland. My favorite karaoke songs, I like Dreams by Fleetwood Mac. I like New York State of Mind by Billy Joel. Maybe I'll do, like, a song from Queen if I'm feeling particularly feisty. I like Bohemian Rhapsody. Are you kidding? I was a kid actor. I'm all the parts. Beauty and the Beast was popular when I was a kid. We would do the opening scene where Belle walks and sings a song about, you know, this provincial town. My sister was always Belle, and I played the entire town, obviously. I was like, I don't want to be Belle. I want to be the baker. I want to be the candlestick maker. I want to be those three, like, girls that like Gaston. I want to be Gaston. Yeah. I want to be LeFou. I love them all. My first kiss was, well, I didn't like my first kiss, so I redid it. Yeah. It was, like, not, I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. So I redid it. The one I liked was at, like, a kind of, like, a party that was, like, kind of boys and girls kind of kissing party. It was, like, a spin the bottle kind of. That one was better. One year for Christmas, you know, my mom used to give us the Toys R Us catalog, and you could circle, like, one or two things that you really wanted. And so I, for some reason, wanted this tent. It was a Jurassic Park tent, and my mom bought it for me. My poor sister, because we shared a room, I erected the tent in the middle of our very small bedroom, and I lived in it for, like, a year. Well, I lived in it as, like, a bedroom, but it was inside a bedroom. It was a bedroom inside a bedroom. I played in the tent, read in the tent. I mean, I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And it was so cool, because at night, you know, the light, you'd have a flashlight inside, and then the whole outside of the tent was Jurassic Park. There were all the dinosaurs all around. It just really smelled, like, terrible. I was probably really toxic, but it was pretty great. I would buy it again for my own child. And then after, like, about a year, my sister was like, this is insane. She's like, I can't, I've been walking around this tent for a year. When I was probably nine, I worked on a film called Just Cause, and Lawrence Fishburne was in it. We were traveling somewhere for the film. We were all on a plane, and I passed him in the aisle, and he said to me, hey, let me ask you a question. Do you want to be an actor, or do you want to be a movie star? And, you know, in my mind, I didn't really know. I didn't know what he meant exactly. I felt like, you know, you can be both, right? I mean, you can be both. He was saying to me, he was like, are you here to do the work? And, you know, I internalized that. If your end goal is just to be a movie star, well, you know, that's one, that's different than acting. Is this a porn name? My first pet's name was Tapioca. The first street I grew up on, I was on 86th Street. 86 Tapioca. Tapioca 86 sounds like, that's Tapioca 86? Is that like a character from League of Their Own? That's what it sounds like. Hey, Tapioca! And the number's 86? That's weird. Chris Evans never thought of it before. What? Chris Evans never thought of his porn name? I don't believe that. He's way, he way thought of that before. Definitely. With all the free time he has to think about crap, it's crossed his mind. Believe me, I sit next to him in a makeup chair. I know what else crosses his mind. I think you should do a musical together. What are we, what musical is this going to be? Dirty Dancing the Musical? Dirty Dancing the Musical. I can only see Patrick Swayze in that part. It would be like, just long. Could be anybody else. I mean, I'm sure Chris Evans could, you know, pull it off, but it wouldn't be the same.