Being an action star helped make her one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood, but things could have gone a lot worse for Scarlett Johansson on her first major blockbuster after she almost ended up with her number of working eyes being reduced by 50%.
There comes a time in every fast-rising performer’s career – usually not too long after their breakthrough role – that they get offered an explosive epic designed to put as many butts in seats as possible during the summer months. Sure enough, for Johansson, it came in the aftermath of Lost in Translation.
She was already an experienced actor by then, of course, having started out as a kid. In her formative years, she worked under Rob Reiner on North, starred opposite Sean Connery in Just Cause, co-led cult classic Ghost World, was directed by scene partner Robert Redford on The Horse Whisperer, and fled from CGI spiders in Eight Legged Freaks, so she was far from a rookie.
However, a Michael Bay production is a completely different ballgame, as she discovered on The Island. Notable for being the first box office bust of the filmmaker’s career, Johansson and Ewan McGregor played the leads in the thinly-veiled Logan’s Run facsimile that finds a pair of clones discovering the secret behind their existence and making a run for freedom.
It may have been sci-fi with visual effects in abundance, but Bay has always tried to capture as much of his signature Bayhem in-camera as possible. For Johansson, that came with its own set of risks and rewards. “I almost lost an eye. That was fun,” she admitted to Pop Entertainment. “I had a permanently blue knee. That was pretty gross.”
Although she didn’t specify the exact cause of her ocular malady, being a Bay flick, it could have literally been anything. Was it a rogue explosion? A flying piece of shrapnel? A co-star miscommunication? A harness-induced mishap? Johansson steered clear of pointing fingers, but she did reveal McGregor was terrified on her behalf.
“Almost losing my eye, that was really a drag,” she said with the greatest of understatements. “Ewan was so freaked out.” Suffering for their art is part and parcel of the acting business, but on the plus side, Johansson hasn’t suffered any more mishaps that could have robbed her of 20/20 vision in the years since.
Thanks to a combination of technological advances, heightened safety measures, and her own increased experience, nearly losing an eye turned out to be a one-time deal. Since The Island, she’s played Natasha Romanoff in eight Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, anchored Luc Besson’s ludicrous Lucy, stirred up a firestorm with Ghost in the Shell and boarded the Jurassic Park franchise, which from the perspective of her peepers has gone off without a hitch.
