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Scarlett Johansson: naked scenes 'liberating' (Exclusive)

Actress says being nude on-screen for ‘Under The Skin’ was necessary for her character.

Scarlett Johansson has carved an interesting career to date, alternating crowd-pleasing blockbusters like ‘The Avengers’ with more personal, low-budget indie films like ‘Her’ and ‘Don Jon’.

Her latest film, the hypnotic chiller ‘Under The Skin’, sees the actress playing a predatory alien which dons a human skin (that looks suspiciously like Scar-Jo) to prey on unwitting single males found roaming the rain-soaked streets of Scotland.

It’s a chilling, vampiric turn as the killer E.T., one that requires the actress to spend significant amount of screen time in the nude, something that Johansson has been reticent of doing in the past.


But, she felt it was absolutely necessary for her character in this, the new film from mercurial film-maker Jonathan Glazer.

“I’m a pretty private person. It’s not like I want to be displaying myself all over the place,” explains Scarlett to Yahoo in our video above.

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“But I think I realised that through the process of just letting go, and allowing myself as the character to be totally present in the moment, and making the discovery of my own self, as [my character] does… I realised what kind of judgements I place on myself, and how self-conscious I am about all different kinds of things.”

“That wasn’t just the nudity, but many different situations, where I just had to… we just couldn’t capture what we needed unless I was totally free of myself.”

“That, in a sense, was very liberating.”



And how about filming in Scotland, did she get to try any of the national ‘delicacies’?

“Deep-fried Mars bars, I didn’t get a chance to try. I did try Irn-Bru though, which I don’t think I’m ’Scottish’ enough for, I’ll just put it that way.”

“But a deep-fried Mars bar, I think I could get into that.”  

The deeply chilling ‘Under The Skin’ is in cinemas from Friday, 14 March 2014.

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