Comedian W.C. Fields famously quipped “never work with children or animals”, but it’s a piece of advice Scarlett Johansson (once a child star herself) is happy to ignore as she appears with both in her new film, We Bought A Zoo.

“As you know, it’s not my first time working with animals,” smiles the 27-year-old actress who was just eight years old when she began acting professionally, and only 13 when she won her first breakout movie role as a traumatised teen, saddling up alongside Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer.

LIVING IN THE PRESENT

Like many former child actors who’ve grown up in the spotlight, Johansson is like an old soul trapped in the body of an ingénue. Having already ticked a number of life’s milestones off her list – marriage, career kudos, awards – she’s grateful to be heading towards an age that seems more appropriate to her life experience. “I’m actually excited about getting older. I don’t want to be 20 anymore. I look forward to playing women; not young women or ing��nues, but real women. I think there’s much more opportunity to learn about yourself in that realm than in the other.

“I feel like I’ve lived a long time already, so I can only imagine that there must be a lot of interesting, different paths to take down the road. Right now, I’m learning to live presently,” says the actress who has never needed a man to define her. Certainly not her ex-husband, Ryan Reynolds, with whom she amicably ended her almost 
three-year marriage in December 2010, 
nor the various men whom she’s 
been linked with since, be it Sean Penn, Justin Timberlake or Kieran Culkin.

Known for her buxom curves, in person, Johansson looks slender and fragile, having been up most of the previous night reprising her Iron Man 2 Black Widow superhero character in the upcoming The Avengers – a role which requires her to dye her blonde hair a fiery red and suit up in figure-hugging latex.

Her trademark husky, come-to-bed voice is soothed by the chamomile tea she sips from a china cup as we chat in a suite at New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a five-minute cab ride from her new penthouse apartment in midtown Sutton Place.

Dressed in a camel-brown Chanel cardigan with Steven Alan black slacks, her easy laugh masks an innate wariness born out of a lifetime of living in the sometimes-suffocating goldfish bowl of tabloid gossip.

THE ZOO PROJECT

Starring opposite Matt Damon in We Bought A Zoo, Cameron Crowe’s feel-good movie based on author Benjamin Mee’s memoir of the same name, Johansson says she prepared for her role as a zookeeper 
by spending time at a Los Angeles 
training facility for animal-handlers.

It’s a vocation, she discovered, that’s not for the faint-hearted. “I wasn’t training to be a trainer or a handler – just a zookeeper, which isn’t the same as actually working with the animals. Zookeepers care for the animals but they don’t handle them, unless they tranquillise them first. They’re not the same as somebody who handles them for a film or a circus or something like that. 
It involves anything from chopping up an elk to feeding vultures and mucking out stalls,” she says knowledgeably.

“I think the most surprising thing for me was just going into the food locker. 
The food locker of a zoo is vile and disgusting – quite gross. When you prepare food for a Turkey Vulture, for instance, 
you take a frozen baby chick out of a bucket of frozen baby chicks, and you rip it into 
pieces and chop it up … like a vegetable, and mix that all up,” she says.

That said, the experience wasn’t bad enough to turn her vegetarian. “Maybe 
for a moment,” she laughs. “I mean, it 
ain’t pretty, you know? But if you’re 
caring for an animal, you can’t be precious about it. You just have to get down and dirty – if you have to handle them, you handle them I guess. Whether that’s snakes or birds or monkeys.

“I’m not a big bird fan so, for me, just being around a parrot was terrifying. 
I don’t like their flapping wings. I was much more scared being around the parrot than I was around any of the big cats,” says the actress, who was unable to have a dog or a cat growing up because 
of her mother’s allergies, substituting 
the traditional family pet with geckos, turtles, frogs, toads and fish.

Today, Scarlett compensates for her dog-free childhood with a chihuahua named Maggie and a big mutt called Baxter, sharing joint custody with Reynolds.

“I’d love to have fish and any number of pets, but everything needs to be cared for. Already just having one chihuahua – we call her the ‘community chihuahua’ because she gets passed around so much from person to person – is sometimes too much.”

Like most actors, who try on other people’s lifestyles for the camera, she’s pondered whether or not she’d enjoy being 
a zookeeper for real, concluding: “I don’t think I’m destined to be a zookeeper. But the thing I liked most about the job was working on the land like that; I like the idea of doing hard labour and that kind of thing.”

HAPPY BY NATURE

Express surprise at the notion of this NYC girl getting her hands dirty and she explains, “It’s more to do with the fact that 
I just like being outside and I like feeling like I earned the day, I guess.

“I also like the idea of doing something that actually matters. I’ve always felt that being a caretaker is a wonderful job to have, of any kind – a doctor, a nurse, a keeper … But whenever I watch movies that I love, that inspire me in some way or even just to escape, I’m happy that that’s what I do for a living,” she says, and confesses how, at six years old, she would watch Edward Scissorhands over and over again.

“I’ve seen it a million times. It’s just such a beautiful story; it moves me. Sometimes you watch a film just because you want to feel moved in some way. It’s the same reason you listen to a song. It’s like when you’re feeling really down and you listen to [jazz musician] Chet Baker and you stare out of the window and it’s raining over Manhattan. You know? That kind of thing. Sometimes you see films and they do the same thing – they enhance your mood or get you out of a mood or whatever.”

Not that she is, by nature, sad or introspective. Citing a published survey stating how Danes are the happiest people in the world, Johansson – whose father is Danish architect Karsten Johansson – reckons she is among that group.

“I don’t know if I have a perspective on everybody else’s happiness, but I am a happy person. I’m a happy Dane and I’m happy to be Danish,” says the star, whose parents separated when she was 13, leaving Johansson and her siblings to be largely raised by her mother, Melanie Sloan.

INVASION OF PRIVACY

Long regarded as a Hollywood sex symbol, Johansson recently fell victim to a hacker who retrieved nude pictures from her phone, leaking the images over the internet.

Unlike Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton, who thrive on such notoriety, she was mortified by the invasion of privacy, hiring an attorney to take down the stolen photos.

Talking with CNN in the wake of the nude pictures, she demanded privacy, saying: “Just because you’re an actor or make films or whatever doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to your own personal privacy … if that is besieged in some way, it feels unjust. It’s an adjustment, but I think 
there are certain instances where you 
give a lot of yourself and finally you have 
to kind of put your foot down and say, 
‘Oh, wait, I’m taking it back’.”

“I never had any ideas of being a celebrity as a kid,” she tells me. “The idea 
of celebrity even 15 years ago was 
different than it is now. It’s a different 
time; a different kind of level of respect 
and distance between the actors and the media. I don’t know how you ever adjust 
to it. I haven’t figured that out yet. It’s 
a whole lifestyle change, but I live a very low-key lifestyle. I just wanted to act when 
I was little. I wanted to be in musicals 
and movies and I never wanted to be famous. That was never my goal.”

Not so surprisingly, this quadruple Golden Globe nominee and Tony Award- winning actress longs for a time when 
she will work less in front of the 
cameras and more behind them.

“I’ve wanted to direct ever since I was 
in The Horse Whisperer. I don’t think I’ll 
stay in front of a camera forever,” she 
says, revealing how she’s in the process 
of adapting a Truman Capote book.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

“Part of the attraction also is that I’d like 
to be back living in New York for more than just a few weeks at a time. I travel 
a lot, so for me, being on vacation is to 
be at home. I like to have a regular schedule, get up, go to the gym, meet up with a friend for lunch, come home, cook 
a dinner, go to the movies, go out for drinks. I like to just have a nice routine.

“I also love to cook. I’m pretty good at it. I enjoy cooking ‘clean food’, like fish and vegetables. I make all the holiday dinners and bake a lot. It’s a big passion of mine. I’m a big advocate of food of all sorts. I would love to own a restaurant. I’ve thought about that a lot, although I wouldn’t want to run 
a restaurant. No way, that’s too hard.”

Rejoicing in her life, she says, “I am never bored. I never ever get bored. Life is too short to be bored ever. Everything interests me. Human nature, interaction, communication, lack of communication. 
As an actor, I feel that I am an observer, 
and that, for me, keeps every situation 
from being boring … There is always something to think about.”

hough she stars in We Bought A Zoo, Johansson isn’t known for supporting 
animal charities. “I support a lot of human charities,” says the actress who, before our chat, had recently returned from East Africa in her role as Oxfam ambassador, recording a video-blog about her experience visiting refugee camps in Dadaab, Turkana 
and Lodwar on Huffington Post.

It’s extraordinary that she’s been an ambassador for Oxfam since her early twenties; an age when most young women wouldn’t normally be preoccupied by 
such weighty considerations.

“I am proud to be an ambassador of Oxfam,” says Scarlett, who also works closely with USA Harvest, and (RED).

“Travelling with Oxfam is always an invaluable learning experience, as it 
enables me to see both the problems 
and the solutions,” she explains.

“My role with Oxfam includes not only raising awareness of global issues, but also getting the word out there that if someone wants to donate to a cause that has a low administrative cost and is doing work on 
the ground with disaster relief as well 
as providing long-term solutions, then 
Oxfam is a responsible place to donate.”

In 2010, Johansson collaborated with fashion label MANGO and designed an exclusive handbag to help Oxfam raise 
funds for victims of the Haiti earthquake.

To find out more about Oxfam or to make a donation, visit Johansson’s fundraising 
site at oxfamamerica.org/scarlett