For more than a decade, Scarlett Johansson was Natasha Romanoff.

The red hair, black tactical suit and dry humor of Black Widow became so closely associated with her that an entire generation could be forgiven for thinking of Johansson primarily as a Marvel action star.

But look outside the Avengers movies and a much stranger career appears.

She has played a clone discovering that her body was created for someone else, a New Jersey woman trapped in her own romantic fantasies, an alien predator wandering Scotland, a rapidly evolving superhuman and a cyborg struggling to understand who she really is. She has also played one of cinema’s most memorable wartime mothers — and, most recently, returned to blockbuster territory with dinosaurs instead of superheroes.

These eight roles show how much of Scarlett Johansson’s career exists beyond Black Widow.

1. The Island — Jordan Two Delta

Five years before Natasha Romanoff entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Johansson was already running through a science-fiction blockbuster.

Michael Bay’s 2005 film The Island cast her as Jordan Two Delta, who lives alongside Lincoln Six Echo, played by Ewan McGregor, inside an apparently protected community. The residents believe the outside world has been contaminated and dream of winning a lottery that will send them to a paradise known as “the Island.”

The truth is far darker: they are clones created for wealthy clients who may eventually require their organs or other biological services. Jordan is the clone of Sarah Jordan, a woman injured in an accident.

It is an early example of a theme that would repeatedly appear in Johansson’s science-fiction work: a woman learning that the identity she has been given may not actually belong to her.

2. Don Jon — Barbara Sugarman

There are no assassins or futuristic laboratories in Don Jon. Instead, Johansson transforms herself through voice, posture, makeup and attitude.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s 2013 comedy-drama casts her as Barbara Sugarman, the glamorous woman Jon Martello becomes convinced is his ideal girlfriend.

But Don Jon is partly about fantasies people absorb from screens. Jon’s expectations are shaped by pornography, while Barbara has her own romanticized ideas about what a boyfriend and relationship should look like.

Johansson leans into the character’s heightened New Jersey persona, making Barbara simultaneously magnetic, funny, demanding and deliberately artificial. She is not simply the hero’s dream woman. She is another person trying to force real life to behave like entertainment.

Released during Johansson’s Marvel years, the movie demonstrated how comfortable she remained playing characters who were messy rather than heroic.

3. Under the Skin — The Woman Who Barely Seems Human

Then came perhaps the strangest performance of her career.

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin places Johansson in Scotland as an unnamed extraterrestrial who drives through Glasgow and approaches men before luring them toward a horrifying fate.

Much of the performance depends on observation rather than conventional dialogue or exposition.

Glazer pushed the experiment further by filming some street encounters with hidden cameras and using men who initially did not know they were participating in a movie with Scarlett Johansson. She wore a dark wig and adopted a different identity while driving through Glasgow.

The result feels almost like Johansson has erased her celebrity.

Her character begins as a detached predator studying human beings from the outside. Gradually, however, experiences involving vulnerability, kindness and physical sensation begin complicating that distance.

Few performances could be further removed from the polished confidence of Black Widow.

4. Lucy — From Terrified Victim to Something Beyond Human

Only months after Under the Skin reached U.S. theaters in 2014, Johansson appeared in a completely different science-fiction experiment.

In Luc Besson’s Lucy, she begins as an ordinary young woman caught in a criminal operation in Taipei. After a synthetic drug enters her system, the film imagines her gaining increasingly extreme mental and physical abilities.

The movie famously builds its plot around the false idea that humans use only 10% of their brains. Besson openly acknowledged that the premise was fiction rather than neuroscience.

More interesting for Johansson is the transformation.

Early Lucy is frightened and desperate. As her abilities increase, much of that recognizable humanity disappears. Besson said the performance required Johansson to strip away many of her normal expressions, movements and personality traits as Lucy becomes increasingly detached.

It turned an action vehicle into an unusual acting exercise: the more powerful the character becomes, the less conventionally human Johansson allows her to appear.

5. Ghost in the Shell — The Role That Became a Controversy

Johansson returned to questions of identity and artificial bodies in 2017’s Ghost in the Shell.

She plays the Major, a cyber-enhanced operative leading the Section 9 task force in a futuristic world where technology can reshape both bodies and minds. As her investigation develops, she begins questioning the story she has been told about her own past.

But Johansson’s casting also became inseparable from the film’s reception.

Because Ghost in the Shell originated as a Japanese manga and anime property, critics accused the production of whitewashing by placing a white Hollywood star at the center of the adaptation. Johansson defended her approach to the character, while the debate became part of a wider discussion about Asian representation in major American films.

That controversy remains part of the movie’s legacy — and makes it one of the most complicated chapters of her blockbuster career.

6. Jojo Rabbit — Rosie Betzler

Two years later, Johansson barely needed action scenes at all to make an impact.

Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit casts her as Rosie Betzler, mother of a German boy who has become fascinated with Nazi ideology during World War II.

Rosie is playful with her son, but behind that warmth is a dangerous secret: she opposes the regime and is hiding a Jewish teenager in their home.

Johansson said she imagined Rosie as a warm, loving presence — someone whose vitality would make her absence deeply felt.

The performance earned Johansson an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress. Remarkably, she was nominated for best actress at the same ceremony for Marriage Story, making 2020 the year her dramatic work received some of the strongest recognition of her career.

7. The MCU — Natasha Romanoff Becomes the Role Everyone Knows

Of course, none of these characters achieved the cultural reach of Natasha Romanoff.

Johansson debuted as Black Widow in Iron Man 2 in 2010 and continued through the Avengers saga, including The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Natasha’s story ultimately turned from espionage and mystery toward sacrifice. Her death in Endgame became one of the film’s emotional turning points, while 2021’s Black Widow went backward in the timeline to confront her history and the people she considered family.

It is understandable that the character dominates public memory of Johansson.

But Marvel was never the entire career. It was running alongside everything else.

8. Jurassic World Rebirth — Zora Bennett

By 2025, Johansson had left Natasha behind and entered another enormous franchise.

In Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth, she plays Zora Bennett, a security and extraction specialist recruited for a dangerous mission involving dinosaur DNA. Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey co-star, with original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp returning to write the film.

The movie opened in July 2025 and ultimately grossed about $869 million worldwide, demonstrating that Johansson could anchor another large-scale action property without relying on the Black Widow identity.

And Zora feels like an appropriate place to look back.

Johansson is once again surrounded by danger, laboratories, impossible science and creatures capable of killing her.

But she is no longer proving that she can be an action star.

She proved that long ago.

The more revealing question is what she has done between the explosions: the alien silently observing humanity, the mother hiding courage behind humor, the clone discovering her own personhood, the woman exaggerating herself into a romantic fantasy.

Black Widow may be the role millions remember first.

These films are the reminder that Scarlett Johansson has rarely been interested in being only one thing.