Timothée Chalamet Pokes Fun at Scarlett Johansson's Claim She Should Be 'Allowed' to Play a Tree
Timothée Chalamet is poking fun at Scarlett Johansson‘s recent comments about casting choices.
The actor was promoting the upcoming Little Women (out Dec. 25) on the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon when he turned to the camera and made an impassioned plea to work with director Greta Gerwig again. Chalamet and Gerwig previously collaborated on her directorial debut Lady Bird, and she brought him along again for her second time in the director’s chair.
“Greta, if you’re watching this, you want me to play a chair or a tree, like Scarlett Johansson, I’ll be a tree,” Chalamet, 23, joked, with host Jimmy Fallon offering to play the chair as Chalamet acted as a tree.
The joke echoed Johansson’s comments from the summer when she told As If magazine she believed that, as an actor, she should be “allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job.”
Her quotes came after the actress stepped down from a role in the movie Rub & Tug the previous summer amid calls for the character to be played by a transgender actor. Johansson, 35, was originally cast as a trans man in the movie.
“Our cultural understanding of transgender people continues to advance, and I’ve learned a lot from the community since making my first statement about my casting and realize it was insensitive. I have great admiration and love for the trans community and am grateful that the conversation regarding inclusivity in Hollywood continues,” Johansson said in a statement at the time after announcing she would be stepping down.
Johansson later clarified her comments in a statement, saying that while she stands by her quotes in As If, they were “edited for click bait” and “widely taken out of context” by outlets who reported on the interview.
“An interview that was recently published has been edited for click bait and is widely taken out of context. The question I was answering in my conversation with the contemporary artist, David Salle, was about the confrontation between political correctness and art. I personally feel that, in an ideal world, any actor should be able to play anybody and Art, in all forms, should be immune to political correctness,” she said in the statement.
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“That is the point I was making, albeit didn’t come across that way. I recognize that in reality, there is a wide spread discrepancy amongst my industry that favors Caucasian, cis gendered actors and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to. I continue to support and always have, diversity in every industry and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included,” Johansson continued.
Little Women — starring Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen as the March sisters — is in theaters Christmas Day.
