Scarlett Johansson‘s single best science-fiction performance may well be one in which she never appears on screen. Her voice work as the operating system in Her did more with pure vocal presence than many actors manage in fully physical roles. She has taken plenty of sci-fi parts since then, including Lucy and Ghost in the Shell, but those films leaned much more on her physical presence.
Now, she’s finally headlining an animated feature where her voice is the standout, and it happens to be a film its director has been trying to make since before Her, Lost in Translation, or even Johansson’s child-actor years were part of the conversation. Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn lands on Netflix Dec. 18, and a new look at the film via Esquire has added villain casting details and fresh images from its retro-futurist world. Bird originally set Ray Gunn up at Turner Feature Animation in the mid-1990s, and when Warner Bros. swallowed Turner, the project died on the table, a collapse that pushed him toward The Iron Giant instead.
Every studio pass since, and there were flirtations from Warner Bros. and Disney among others, stemmed from the same doubt about whether audiences wanted a hard-boiled detective mystery in animated form. Bird never accepted the premise. “For me, it was an unscratched itch. There was something about animation doing film noir but also having more comedy in it and more action,” he tells Esquire, adding:
“I always thought it was weird that people were resistant. I thought, Really? How is this not good popcorn stuff?”
Skydance Animation finally gave him the green light in 2022, with Netflix distributing, and the reported budget north of $150 million suggests nobody is hedging now. The film itself is set in Metropia, an Art Deco vision of tomorrow as 1939 might have drawn it, where jetpacks and flying cars coexist with back-alley crime and a detective trade that automation has nearly wiped out. Sam Rockwell voices Ray Gunn, one of the last private eyes still working, and Johansson plays Venus Nova, a famous entertainer whose troubles drag him into a murder investigation.
The first-look images style her character as a full classic femme fatale, and the pairing reunites her with Rockwell after Iron Man 2 and Jojo Rabbit. Tom Waits voicing Gunn’s one-eyed alien partner Eyera also feels driven as much by personality and atmosphere as by star power. Bird has described the tonal blend elsewhere as “The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers.”
The most notable new detail is the villain. Matt Berry joins as Slugsy Xavier, an alien mob boss, casting that will delight anyone who watched him steal What We Do in the Shadows for six seasons, and Bird himself voices the henchmen Gunsol and Musker in the Edna Mode tradition of director cameos. The new stills tour Gunn’s Discreet Investigations office and a hover-bike chase through the city, and the coverage confirms a PG rating, reportedly after Bird pushed for PG-13. Finally, the film will have its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 10, setting it up as an awards-season play.
- Birthdate
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November 22, 1984
- Birthplace
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New York City, New York, USA
- Birthname
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Scarlett I. Johansson
