Scarlett Johansson

There’s a moment in Lost in Translation where she’s in a red dress at some nightclub, and she’s just standing there, slightly detached, slightly bored, completely present. That’s the thing about her—she has this quality where she seems to exist in a different register than the people around her. Not better, just separate. She carries that into everything, whether she’s playing a blank-slate spy in Marvel movies or disappearing into Sofia Coppola’s Tokyo. The strange thing is that you can watch her be gorgeous—and she is, objectively, in that classic Hollywood way—without it being the interesting part. The interesting part is that she doesn’t seem to care. She gives you what you came for, but she’s never trying to convince you she’s grateful for the attention. That detachment, that refusal to perform gratitude for being beautiful, is probably why people are so obsessed with her. We want to know what she’s thinking when she’s not performing. The answer is probably nothing we’d find that interesting.