Regarding the finest actors in modern cinema, there’s no doubt that Scarlett Johansson is up there with the best. Undoubtedly better known for her role in the Marvel superhero universe, where she starred as Black Widow, Johansson has also thrived in independent cinema thanks to collaborations with the likes of Sofia Coppola, Jonathan Glazer, Luc Besson and Wes Anderson.
Rising to popularity back in the late 1990s, starring in minor roles in middling low-budget flicks, Johansson’s career wouldn’t properly kick off until the turn of the new millennium when she appeared in the quirky coming-of-age comedy Ghost World by Terry Zwigoff. Just 16 years of age at the time of filming, Ghost World would precede her seminal role alongside Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.
As the 21st century chugged on, Johansson grew into a bonafide Hollywood star, taking major roles in Woody Allen’s Match Point, Michael Bay’s The Island, and Christopher Nolan’s underrated magic thriller The Prestige. Four years later, Johansson would make her Marvel debut in Iron Man 2 and catapult her star persona into the stratosphere.
Two years after Iron Man 2, the actor took a role in Hitchcock, a biopic about the great British director Alfred Hitchcock and the making of his 1960 horror, Psycho. Directed by Sacha Gervasi, the film primarily explored the relationship between Hitchcock and his wife, with Anthony Hopkins playing the тιтular filmmaker and Johansson taking the role of Janet Leigh, the real-life actor whose character meets her end in the film’s iconic shower scene.
“You have got to be brave, get into the shower, and face Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock jabbing you in the face with a 12-inch kitchen knife,” Johansson told V Magazine about the filming of the scene. Yet, the moment turned out to be just as frightening as the final scene, with the actor recalling: “As much as Anthony Hopkins is a pussycat, he’s terrifying. Maybe I watched Silence of the Lambs too many times when I was a kid. Maybe I was having some flashbacks. So I didn’t need too much preparation for the scene”.
Known as one of the most influential scenes in all of horror cinema, the shower scene stands on the podium of the genre’s best moments alongside the ‘Chestbuster’ moment from Ridley Scott’s Alien and the transformation scene from John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London.
Finalising her thoughts on the scene and her terrifying encounter with Hopkins, Johansson added: “We only had the luxury to shoot the scene for a day, and everybody was feeling very nervous because it involved water and nobody wants the actor to get wet. They were concerned with modesty and all these things – but I don’t care about any of that stuff and Janet Leigh never did either”.
