Scarlett Johansson has spent decades building one of the most successful careers in Hollywood, but the actress is now admitting that even a $43 million year does not erase the pressure waiting for her at home.
The Black Widow star, who Forbes named the highest-paid actress of 2025, spoke openly about the limits of success during an April 12 interview.
Highlights
- Scarlett Johansson said maintaining a perfect work-life balance is “not possible” and admitted there is always a “deficit” somewhere in her life.
- Forbes named Johansson the highest-paid actress of 2025 after she earned $43 million through acting, backend deals, residuals, and business ventures.
- The actress is working on several upcoming projects including ‘The Batman: Part II,’ and ‘Scapegoat.’
For Johansson, the idea of a perfect work-life balance is not only unrealistic. It is something she believes people need to stop chasing before they can find a healthier way to live.
“I think actually admitting that there is no work-life balance is the first step to kind of getting there in a way, because it’s not possible,” the Marvel star said.
Scarlett Johansson spoke about the difficulty of trying to maintain a healthy work-life balance
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“There’s always something that is… there’s a deficit in some area,” she continued. “And I think you have to be… I learned to be more kind to myself. You can’t do all of these things all the time and so, you know… there’s just like… is it good enough?”
Johansson’s comments come at a busy moment in her professional life.
According to Forbes, the actress earned $43 million in 2025, making her the highest-paid actress of the year. Her earnings were reportedly tied to a combination of acting work, backend deals, residuals, and business ventures.
That success, however, has not given her a clean answer to the daily demands of marriage, motherhood, acting, and entrepreneurship.
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Johansson is currently balancing her marriage to comedian and writer Colin Jost, best known for his work on Saturday Night Live, while raising their children and continuing to take on major professional projects.
She and Jost tied the knot in October 2020. In August 2021, they welcomed their son, Cosmo. The couple also have a second child, a daughter, whose name has largely been kept private.
Johansson also shares an 11-year-old daughter, Rose, with French journalist Romain Dauriac, to whom she was married from 2014 to 2017. Before that, she was married to actor Ryan Reynolds from 2008 to 2011.
Her marriage to Jost is his first.
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Beyond acting, Johansson is also one of the co-founders of The Outset, a clean-beauty skincare line launched in 2020. The brand has added another layer to her already crowded professional life, placing her in the position of actress, entrepreneur, wife, and mother at the same time.
“Somebody once told me, ‘If you’re successful as a parent like 75% of the time, that’s good,’” Johansson told CBS Sunday Morning.
“If you’re doing 75% of it like right, then you’re winning, which is probably true.”
Johansson’s financial success stands in sharp contrast to her low-income, welfare-dependent upbringing
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During a 2017 interview with Entertainment Tonight, the actress described growing up in a family that depended on government assistance.
“We were living on welfare, we were on food stamps,” Johansson said at the time.
“My parents were raising four kids in a low-income household in Manhattan. So, it was a lot.”
Her rise began early, but one of the clearest turning points came with Sophia Copolla’s 2003 movie Lost in Translation, which helped establish Johansson as one of the defining young actresses of the early 2000s.
That period brought visibility, but it also came with a harsher kind of scrutiny.
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In April, Johansson told People Magazine that entering the spotlight as a young woman in the early 2000s was especially difficult because of the way women were judged and limited by the industry.
“I think growing up in the entertainment industry and being 20-something years old in the early 2000s, being a 20-year-old woman in the early 2000s in the spotlight, I think in general it was just a really harsh time,” Johansson said.
“I think women were just pulled apart for how they looked in a way that was socially acceptable at the time, and it was tough,” she continued.
“There was a lot placed on how women looked and what was offered at that time for women my age as far as acting roles or opportunities, it was much slimmer than it is now.”
The actress has several projects in various stages of production that are expected to be released over the next year
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In recent weeks, the actress has been tied to several major projects across film and television, adding to a workload that already includes acting, producing, business ventures, and parenting.
Johansson is set to star in Scapegoat, director Ari Aster’s next film at A24 after Eddington. Aster will reportedly direct from his own script, with Johansson attached to lead the project.
She has also joined the cast of The Batman: Part II, Matt Reeves’ sequel to the 2022 Robert Pattinson film.
Reeves has confirmed several cast additions, including Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Brian Tyree Henry, and Charles Dance, while the film is currently set for an October 1, 2027, theatrical release.
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At the same time, Johansson’s latest completed work has already been moving through the festival circuit.
James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which reunited Johansson with her Marriage Story co-star Adam Driver and also stars Miles Teller, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, where it received a lengthy standing ovation.
Johansson was not there to receive the reaction in person, reportedly because she was filming The Exorcist reboot in Los Angeles.
Her work behind the camera is also expanding. Deadline reported that Johansson is producing a Netflix series adaptation of The Nanny Diaries, the 2002 novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus that she previously helped bring to the screen in the 2007 film version.
The project is in development at Netflix, with Johansson attached as an executive producer.
"Oh poor baby." Many listeners found Johansson's comments to be in bad taste
