News / Published 2026-11-05

Scarlett Johansson on a Batman Role She Found Hard to Crack

Scarlett Johansson said her role in The Batman Part II gave her “a lot of existential angst”, The Hollywood Reporter reports. The line came in an Entertainment Tonight interview published Wednesday, when she was asked which of her coming projects pushed her furthest out of her comfort zone.

(See the reader poll and source context below).

Scarlett Johansson told Entertainment Tonight that her part in The Batman Part II gave her a lot of existential angst; one paper says the character is still secret, the other names her Gilda Dent.

A flat vector illustration of a quiet interior corridor in one-point perspective with muted violet panels and a single pale lit doorway at the far end casting a soft glow on the floor, with the words "A role hard to crack" in the lower-left corner.
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Scarlett Johansson Says Her The Batman Part II Role Was Hard to Crack — DeadlineReported context: [object Object] [object Object] [object Object] [object Object] [object Object] [object Object] [object Object] [object Object]Not recordedNot recorded

THE SHORT VERSION

  • Scarlett Johansson told Entertainment Tonight that her role in The Batman Part II gave her a lot of existential angst and was hard to crack, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
  • THR says twice that her character has not been revealed and lists Sebastian Stan among the new additions without a part; Deadline says she plays Gilda Dent, the wife of Gotham district attorney Harvey Dent.
  • Both papers date her casting to May and give the same Feb. 18, 2028 release date, but only THR reports the October pause and Steven Soderbergh stepping in to finish principal photography.

A Lot of Existential Angst

Scarlett Johansson said her role in The Batman Part II gave her “a lot of existential angst”, The Hollywood Reporter reports. The line came in an Entertainment Tonight interview published Wednesday, when she was asked which of her coming projects pushed her furthest out of her comfort zone. She named the Batman film over The Exorcist: Martyrs, and she attached no explanation beyond the phrase itself, saying only that the feeling had arrived for some reason.

Deadline has the same quote from the same interview and supplies the distance travelled: Johansson is no stranger to a big-budget superhero film, but the jump from Marvel to DC put her in territory the paper calls uncharted. It also calls her a two-time Oscar nominee, a line THR does not carry. The two accounts agree on the words she used and differ on how much of the interview they reconstruct, and neither prints the exchange in full.

Hard to Crack, by Her Account

Johansson said the part was very hard to figure out and that she did not know why. In the longer version both papers quote, she wonders whether it was the role, where she was in her life, or something else, and settles on the fact that it was just hard to crack. She added that it was a tough role in a lot of ways and that this was all she could say about it, which closes the subject in the same breath as it raises it.

THR frames the answer as her being unsure exactly why the role was difficult, and says she went on to explain that it was particularly hard to figure out. Deadline frames the same words as a role she found hard to figure out as she joined the cast of the sequel. Neither paper presses her for a reason, and neither reports a follow-up about which scenes caused the difficulty. No description of preparation, no scene and no director's note appears in either piece, so the difficulty stays a claim she makes about the work rather than a detail either paper can show.

Gilda Dent, in One Paper Only

The two papers disagree on how much of the role is public. THR says her character has yet to be revealed, once in its opening line and again after describing the interview, and it never names a part. Deadline names her: Gilda Dent, the wife of Gotham district attorney Harvey Dent, played by Sebastian Stan. That sentence is the single largest difference between the two reports, and it turns a story about an unnamed part into a story about a marriage inside the film.

Neither paper describes what Gilda Dent does in the film. Deadline gives the marriage and her husband's job and stops there, and THR lists Stan among the new additions without a role at all. THR puts Charles Dance, Brian Tyree Henry and Sebastian Koch alongside him. So the cast is agreed and the characters are not: one paper has four new names, the other has the same four names and one wife among them.

Confirmed in May, Shot Later

Both papers date her casting to May. THR says director Matt Reeves confirmed then that Johansson would join the sequel to his 2022 film, which stars Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne and Batman. Deadline says she joined the cast in May, and adds that Reeves shared test shots of Pattinson back in the suit that month as Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in the UK was turned into Gotham City. Neither paper says when her own scenes were shot.

The production record differs in what each paper includes. Deadline reports that James Gunn said last July the script was finished after several delays, and that an August letter to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders put the start of filming in the spring. THR reports a pause instead: production briefly stopped in October after Reeves stepped away to attend to a family matter, and later that month Steven Soderbergh came in, with the studio's support, to help Reeves complete the final stretch of principal photography.

February 18, 2028, Twice Printed

Both papers give the same release date, Feb. 18, 2028. Deadline adds that the date was recently pushed to that slot, so the date in print is a recent one. THR states it as the current schedule and offers no history behind it. The title is also spelled two ways, The Batman Part II in THR and The Batman: Part II in Deadline, which is a house-style difference and not a disagreement about the film.

That is the whole of the agreement on the calendar. THR carries the Soderbergh detail and the October pause; Deadline carries the script timing, the shareholder letter and the Leavesden shoot. Neither paper reports a budget, a runtime, a first image from the film or a start date for promotion. Neither says how large the Gilda Dent part is, or what the sequel does with the marriage that one of the two papers puts at the centre of her casting.

What Neither Paper Answers

The role remains the open question. One paper says the character is undisclosed and the other says she plays Gilda Dent, and neither says how much screen time the part carries. Johansson's own answer explains the difficulty without naming it, which leaves the existential angst attached to a part that one report will not describe and the other describes in a single clause about a marriage.

What is fixed is small: a May confirmation, a February 2028 date, four new cast names and one quote about how hard the work was. Related coverage on this site includes the release set for Social Reckoning, the 3D and Meta plan for the new Hunger Games film and the theatrical window Netflix kept off IMAX screens.

Sources & reporting limits

  1. Scarlett Johansson on Her The Batman Part II Role and Its Existential Angst — The Hollywood Reporter
  2. Scarlett Johansson Says Her The Batman Part II Role Was Hard to Crack — Deadline
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