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Scarlett Johansson: I "Mishandled" That Whole Trans Casting Controversy

"I felt terribly about it," the actress told "Vanity Fair."

Remember that whole transgender casting controversy surrounding the historical film Rub & Tug? Scarlett Johansson does, too, and she's got some regrets.

Speaking to Vanity Fair for the magazine's Oscars issue cover story, the Best Actress contender revealed that she "felt terribly" about how she handled the whole situation. After news of ScarJo being cast to play a transgender male character in Rub & Tug spread like wildfire and angered LGBTQ actors last summer, the actress released a kneejerk statement to Bustle telling the outlet to contact "Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment."

Shortly afterward, Johansson ended up quitting the project and issuing a more sympathetic public statement to Out magazine, NewNowNext reported in July 2018.

Reflecting on the whole debacle more than a year later, the 35-year-old actress admitted that she "mishandled that situation":

In hindsight... I was not sensitive, my initial reaction to it. I wasn’t totally aware of how the trans community felt about those three actors playing—and how they felt in general about cis actors playing—transgender people. I wasn’t aware of that conversation—I was uneducated. So I learned a lot through that process. I misjudged that.

The criticism also followed another casting controversy involving Johansson: her role as an Asian character in 2017’s Ghost in the Shell, a sci-fi film based off of a Japanese manga of the same name—and helmed by the same director as Rub & Tug.

Johansson added that the period after she quit Rub & Tug was a "hard time," and feeling like she was "kind of tone-deaf to something" was not a good feeling for a veteran actress. Here's hoping she learned a little something about sensitivity toward transgender actors looking to break into Hollywood?

Controversies aside, Johansson has gotten plenty of work as of late. She recently starred in Jojo Rabbit and Marriage Story and is slated to reprise her role as the titular superhero Black Widow in a forthcoming 2020 flick from Marvel Studios.

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