Scarlett Johansson revealed on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast (via IndieWire) that her orgasm recordings for the movie “Her” resulted in Joaquin Phoenix fleeing the set. Phoenix starred in the Spike Jonze-directed drama as a man who falls in love with his phone’s operating system, a Siri-like female voice named Samantha, played by Johansson. The two have a sexual relationship in the form of phone sex, which required Johansson to record herself fake orgasming.
“We tried to get through one take, and he was, like, losing it,” Johansson said. “He left the studio. He needed a break.”
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Johansson added, “You don’t want to hear your voice ever. You definitely don’t want to hear what you sound like having an orgasm. You definitely don’t want to hear what you sound like having a fake orgasm — ew. It’s so gross. It was so bizarre.”
Samantha Morton was originally cast as Samantha in “Her” and the movie shot with her reciting the phone’s dialogue. Johansson replaced Morton in post-production, re-recording all the dialogue and filming additional scenes with Phoenix. “Her,” released to critical acclaim in December 2013, won Jonze the Oscar for original screenplay. The film was also nominated for best picture.
During the same “Armchair Expert” podcast interview, Johansson spoke out about being hypersexualized during the early days of her career. The Oscar nominee said being objectified became so standard that she thought her career would end.
“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,” Johansson said. “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.”
“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 hypersexualized thing,” Johansson continued. “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?’”
Next up for Johansson is her first Wes Anderson project, the star-studded “Asteroid City,” followed by Kristin Scott Thomas’ directorial effort “My Mother’s Wedding” opposite Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham.
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