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After three decades in Hollywood, Scarlett Johansson remains one of the most known, yet seemingly unknowable, people on the planet. But when she lets you in, she really lets you in. Behind the steely armor of red carpet couture and camera-ready skin, there’s a working mom like any you’ve met: spinning plates, righting wrongs, protecting her kids, and namechecking her therapist. All you need is the invitation.
9:53 A.M. THURSDAY, STUDIO 1A, ROCKEFELLER CENTER—“Seven minutes to the fourth hour!” Speakers erupt inside the TODAY show studio, calling for the fill-in co-host to get to the anchor desk. Inside Scarlett Johansson’s dressing room, her glam team and assistant scroll on their phones. There is no sign of the actor. She’s still in a meeting with show producers. But right on time, Johansson will sit down with host Jenna Bush Hager and reveal on live television that she was once ghosted and dumped. She and Hager will get their ears pierced while holding hands. She will be asked if she likes mayonnaise. She will, with her inimitable, vocal-fry-alto voice, admit she likes Blues Traveler. Then, during a commercial break, she will race up a narrow staircase to a 30-square-foot kitchen.

Scarlett Johansson is making chicken wings on live television. That’s a fairly absurd sentence, but it’s reality. I’m watching Johansson’s last day as the guest host on TODAY with Jenna & Friends—a gambit of revolving famous faces following longtime star Hoda Kotb’s departure from the show on January 10. A chef from Queens BBQ joint Pig Beach is next to her doing the rapid-fire-morning-show-how-to thing. It could have been a rote moment on American television. If, of course, one of the hosts wasn’t Scarlett Fucking Johansson.

She’s into it. The sleeves of her oversized blazer are rolled up. As I witness her genuine surprise at the addition of baking soda to the lemon pepper marinade, I have a realization: Johansson is The Last Old-Hollywood Actress Working Today. The voice, the face, the talent, the glamour, it combines to put her right there alongside Bacall, Garbo, Kelly, Hepburn, Hepburn. What’s more, Johansson possesses (until perhaps this very second?) something all too vital—and increasingly rare: a sense of mystery.

As the segment ends, she offers me a chicken wing. “You gotta try the lemon pep!” Then she races downstairs for a segment on “what the kids are saying.”

Johansson, 40, came to fame exclusively via films: Lost In Translation, Marriage Story, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Match Point, Ghost World. She had a very lucrative superhero turn. As Natasha Romanoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of only two female characters in the MCU to have her own stand-alone movie, Johansson ultimately saved the universe in Avengers: Endgame. (If you’re a Marvel geek like me, you’ll recall Black Widow sacrificing herself to acquire the Soul Stone on Vormir, which was a crucial step in allowing the Avengers to reverse Thanos’s devastating “snap.”) And, hey, she’s got the receipts: Johansson is the second-highest grossing actor of all time, with more than $14 billion worldwide. (If you want to be gendered about it, she’s the highest-grossing female. Only Samuel L. Jackson has a bigger box office.)

All of which naturally brings us to the dressing room door belonging to Hager, after the show. As we sidestep head-set-ed producers, rolling racks, and trays of tiny cupcakes, she tells me how she and Johansson met not too long ago at a dinner party and hit it off. “Then Scarlett was here as a guest after Hoda announced she was leaving,” Hager remembers, “and I asked her, ‘Would you ever come and guest host?’ And she said ‘100 percent.’”

Yeah, right. Johansson, so famously private that her husband made a joke about it at last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner (“Don’t be shy. Come right up. She hates privacy!”), sitting down for a solid week on mid-morning television to talk about kids, dating, and flower arranging? Surely you thought she was being polite, I ask Hager. “Of course! I was like, Is this real?” It was.

“She’s intentional,” Hager says she’s come to realize. “Okay, and she wears cool clothes. Scarlett is an Avenger. But her badassery is not surpassed by her kindness and her generosity. It’s miraculous for somebody who’s been in this industry for so long, which can turn people…” Hager’s light Texan twang peters out with the ellipsis. “You know. Into not kind and generous. I keep being like, There’s some kind error, because you’re famous.”