ScarJo's a Full-Time Smarty-Pants

Canada

ScarJo's a Full-Time Smarty-Pants

Tue., Aug. 5, 2008 8:36 AM PDT by Leslie Gornstein

Scarlett Johansson, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Victor Bello/TWC 2008

She sings. She cracks jokes. She makes guys pant. No wonder director Woody Allen says Scarlett Johansson "can do anything."

And Johansson doesn’t exactly disagree.

"You're always, as an actor, becoming, like, an expert at something in two weeks," Scarlett said in a press roundtable Monday. “I remember, for The Man Who Wasn't There, I had to learn to play a Beethoven sonata. I was like, 'Aaaah! Ooookay! I've never touched this thing before!' "

Then there were the riding lessons for The Horse Whisperer...

"And I'm like, 'I'm from Manhattan,' " ScarJo recalls. "[As an actor], you're always learning a fight, or some kind of dance, and that's great. That's always a plus. Every actor is an expert, like a minor expert, in one thing. Like I can speak four sentences in some strange African dialect or something like that."

In her latest flick, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Johansson embarks on a three-way romance with Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Exactly what kind of expertise that entails, we'll leave to the reader's imagination. The movie opens next week.