ScarJo Understands that the Enemy of Those Who Vilify Her Is Her Frenemy

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | April 6, 2017 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | April 6, 2017 |

Scarlett Johansson is not having a good week. Her movie Ghost in the Shell tanked at the box office, most people are blaming the whitewashing controversy, and Johansson herself has done a really bad job of defending the movie — and her casting — against the controversy, telling Good Morning America, “I would never attempt to play a person of a different race,” adding that her character is “a human brain in an entirely machine body, she is essentially identity-less.”

Except that the machine body is that of a Japanese woman named Motoko Kusanagi. That sounds like an identity to me.

Anyway, with all that heat on Johansson, what better way to remove it than by throwing someone else under the bus, like, say, Idunno, someone who the people who complain about whitewashing might not like? Someone who recently said that it does her no good to disagree publicly with her father, the President of the United States, because disagreeing publicly wouldn’t make her a better advocate. Someone like, say, Ivanka Trump, who thinks it is better to disagree privately?

“I thought to myself, ‘Well that’s empowering,’” Johansson said sarcastically, referring to the comments of Ivanka Trump, with whom she grew up in New York and shared friends in common. “You can’t have it both ways, right? If you take a job as a public advocate, then you must advocate publicly, right?”

“It’s such an old-fashioned concept that to be a powerful woman you can’t appear to be concerned with appearances. Screw that, it’s so old-fashioned, it’s so uninspired and actually really cowardly.”

You can’t have it both ways, huh? Like, you can’t play a robot with the body of a Japanese woman with a Japanese name and also be “identity-less”? Like, you can’t say that “diversity is important” in Hollywood, and then turn around and take a role better suited to an Asian woman? You mean, like that?

Sources: Variety, HuffPo, USA Today,