‘Lucy’ Takes the Box Office While Scarlett Johansson Takes on Motherhood

John Scura

The nursery in Scarlett Johansson’s Manhattan home is getting crowded, filling with baby things as the 29-year-old actress prepares to become a first-time mother. She is due this month after keeping her pregnancy secret until last March, but as early as last December she had dropped some hints about it when she told the Daily Mail, “I would like to have my own family. That would be nice. They say it’s never the right time and I am sure that’s true, but I think you have to plan it like anything else. At some point it’s something I look forward to. I am fortunate in that I have had a long career – 20 years – that has been very diverse. So, you know, picking a time to plan a family feels like something that I could do and not feel as though I was missing out.”

Apparently Scarlett meant to keep her pregnancy out of the press a bit longer, but that was nixed while shooting her fourth turn as “The Black Widow” in The Avengers film series with a noticeable belly bump. The producers insist that no scenes were trimmed due to that, but they hired three stunt doubles with uncanny resemblances to the actress.

Scarlett recently admitted that she knows there will be “some sacrifices” that she’ll need to make in balancing her career demands with motherhood. She has commiserated with several other actress-moms about what to expect, and how to negotiate the choices and the pitfalls.

“There must exist a world where I can balance those things, be able to raise a family and still be able to make a film a year,” she told WSJ Magazine. “I know that’s the struggle with working mothers and successful careers. It happens. With [male] actors, it just doesn’t happen that way. You can be every woman’s fantasy and nobody thinks twice about the fact that you have eight kids, or whatever. It seems so stressful to not be able to spend time with your family because you’re constantly chasing the tail of your own success. But I want to have it all.”

The soon-to-be father is Romaine Dauriac, the 31-year-old French journalist to whom Scarlett became engaged in September 2013. The couple went public with their engagement two months later, Scarlett sporting a large vintage art deco diamond ring. “It’s lovely to be engaged,” said Scarlett. “It’s a nice romantic time.”

The pair recently arrived in New York after spending time in Paris, even though she admits that her French “is terrible.” When asked which venue would become the principal home for her new family, Scarlett Johansson made a surprising revelation. “I don’t know – maybe neither,” she said. “Who knows? I’ve been thinking lately that maybe it’s good to move to some faraway country where you can ski. I was thinking maybe it would be nice to move to Switzerland.”

There is good reason for Scarlett’s yearning for privacy, having been burned several times, including one instance in which her computer was hacked and a nude picture of herself appeared on the Internet. The hacker was caught and prosecuted, but the incident has left its mark.

“Several years ago,” she says, “I had that awful hacking incident which made me feel so paranoid, but I am trying not to let it affect me. The trappings of this job mean I always feel like I’m protecting not just my personal life but my family, my partner, my lifestyle, my address – everything. Once you accept your fate as someone who’s a recognizable person, who’s no longer anonymous, I think you have a much easier time fitting in than if you are constantly trying to be ‘normal.’”

This mindset, of course, does not include paparazzi, which the actress knows comes with the territory. Scarlett received a good dose of paparazzi mobbing while she filmed Lucy in Taipei for Universal Pictures. The photographers from Hong Kong’s press were especially aggressive, but Scarlett rolled with it. Director Luc Besson, however, was less understanding. During a shoot at Taipei 101, one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, he became so enraged by the constant paparazzi interruptions that he considered abandoning the city and filming elsewhere. But film there he did, along with locations in New York and Paris, and today Lucy is playing to audiences worldwide.

A futuristic sci-fi adventure, Lucy features Scarlett as a drug mule in a world controlled by the mob, street gangs, and corrupt cops. The smuggled drug implanted in her body accidentally leaks into her system with the effect of enabling Lucy to use one hundred percent of her brain’s potential, rather than the ten percent used by most humans. This gives her super powers – not just physical, but intellectual and telekinetic. Lucy has no need to kick butt when she can drop people with her thoughts.

Lucy is bound to add another jewel to an already impressive list of credits that began for Scarlett when she was eight years old on stage, and a year later in her first film as John Ritter’s daughter in the 1994 fantasy comedy North. She won a Tony Award for her performance in the 2010 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, as well as an armload of Golden Globe nominations. Apparently her gift and desire for performing came from her upbringing in Manhattan.

Her father is a Danish architect from Copenhagen who emigrated to New York where he met her Bronx-born mother, who was a producer. Scarlett’s paternal grandfather was Ejner Johansson, a screenwriter and director in Denmark’s film industry, and she has four siblings, including a twin brother with whom she attended PS 41 in trendy Greenwich Village, despite her admission that the family had “little money.”

Now Scarlett sets out to start her own family while keeping her career active in a string of upcoming films following Lucy.