Scarlett Johansson is back in the Wes Anderson universe.
After voicing a character in his 2018 stop-motion-animated film “Isle of Dogs,” the two-time Oscar nominee leads a megawatt cast in Anderson’s latest “Asteroid City” (now playing in New York and Los Angeles, in theaters nationwide Friday).
Featuring Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Margot Robbie, the cosmic comedy centers on a small desert town in the 1950s, where a disparate group of people gather for a kids’ science conference. But the event is thrown into chaos when a bug-eyed alien briefly lands in a nearby meteor crater, leaving travelers quarantined as government officials scramble for answers.
Johansson, 38, plays Midge Campbell, a glamorous but lonely movie star who accompanies her genius daughter (Grace Edwards) to the competition. Midge strikes up a flirtation with a grieving fellow parent named Augie (Jason Schwartzman), who is smitten and feeds her compliments. In return, she asks him to snap her picture and run lines of tragic dialogue, but only ever talking through the windows of their motel bungalows.
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The actress relished the chance to play someone so self-involved.
“She’s sort of a sociopath, which I think is great about her,” Johansson says. “It’s fun to have that to dip into. I often wonder when I meet sociopathic people, ‘Wow, how could you possibly be like that?’ But then, how convenient! (Laughs.) So that was very fun to get to be that person, without the guilt that I normally feel being a nice Jewish girl.”
Anderson, 54, first met Johansson roughly 20 years ago, just before her star-making turn in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 drama “Lost in Translation.” She was the first person he thought to cast in “Asteroid City,” and he wrote the character of Midge by drawing from Golden Age Hollywood icons Marilyn Monroe, Kim Stanley and Joanne Woodward.
“I met Scarlett when she was a teenager, and now, an entire adulthood has happened,” Anderson says. “Suddenly, there she is in this window playing the scene. I remember watching and being like, ‘She reminds me of Gena Rowlands. I feel like I’m seeing a (John) Cassavetes movie in this window.’ ”
The star-studded ensemble is rounded out by Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Jeffrey Wright and Adrien Brody, all of whom have appeared in multiple Anderson films. But it’s the first time the idiosyncratic filmmaker has worked with Tom Hanks, who’s the movie’s quiet center as Augie’s brusque yet benevolent father-in-law.
“If I had worked with Tom Hanks in 1998, I would have been working with ‘Tom Hanks, Big Movie Star,’ “ Anderson says. “But now he’s crossed a threshold into some sort of iconic status. So it was really quite amazing to have him appear in character on set. There was a little bit of a Mount Rushmore feeling about him – he’s just this face (we all know). He seemed like someone walking out of a Norman Rockwell painting onto our set.”
Like all of Anderson’s productions, the “Asteroid City” cast felt like a close-knit theater company: enjoying group dinners nightly while shooting in Spain, and carpooling to the movie’s Cannes Film Festival red carpet in France last month. (The comedy also includes a somewhat meta storyline about an acting troupe staging an “Asteroid City” teleplay.)
Since making this project, Johansson has been itching to return to the stage. She last appeared on Broadway in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 2013, and won a best featured actress Tony Award for Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” in 2010.
“I would love to do another show,” Johansson says. The “Asteroid City” cast is filled with “theater actors that I love, and I would love to find some play to do with Jeffrey Wright. That immersive experience is so rewarding. It’s great.”
