Red carpet events should be old hat for Scarlett Johansson by now, but the longtime actress was recently floored when she was asked to watch footage of a woman disappearing in the background of one interview video she appeared in.
After The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon shared a viral clip of a woman literally seeming to disappear behind the actress, things took a bit of a shocking turn when the Asteroid City actress admitted the woman was her own dear mother.
No, really. The video was running around on TikTok before Fallon’s team caught wind of it. It’s from a 2006 Golden Globes Awards red carpet, the year the actress starred in films like The Black Dahlia and The Prestige, and in it Johansson’s mom briefly appears onscreen before seemingly disappearing into thin air.
Apparently, the actress had never seen this clip of herself and the mysterious disappearing woman, but shockingly the woman in the video is Johansson’s actual mother, Melanie Sloan, which she revealed after the late night host shared the video on the air. You can actually see her mom pop up in the back of some of the professional pH๏τos she took on the night of the event too. Not sure if this was pre or post her disappearing act, but she looks fine.
Yes, some of them violate the terms and accidentally give out minor spoilers. But we often wonder just how much a Marvel actor knows about the future of the MCU, and how many details are they trying to protect from the media and fans when they deflect and defer? Well, something unusual happened during our 2019 interview with Tom Holland on behalf of Spider-Man: Far From Home.
I was going back over this footage for the purpose of a different story. And when I heard Holland answer my above question, in the context of what we now know, my jaw hit the floor. Play the clip, and then we will discuss. The question that I asked Tom Holland was relatively harmless. Where do they hope that Spider-Man, the character AND the franchise, can take the MCU as it moves into Phase Four. With Avengers: Endgame, some heavy hitters such as Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) were coming off of the board. It will be up to other established heroes to carry the banner forward. But Holland used this question as an opportunity to put a possible team up out into the ether, and now, watching the clip over again in 2021, I think he knew exactly what was going to happen in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Oh my God, that is my mom. That is my mom. That woman with the dark hair is my mother. That’s my mom! I’ve been looking for her for like the last 15 years.
It seems pretty clear from The Tonight Show clip that Fallon and his team had no idea what they were getting into when they decided to present this clip to Scarlett Johansson, but as it turns out the payoff of showing her the video was even better than expected. You can see the full late night exchange, below.