After five years of marriage to SNL star Colin Jost, Scarlett Johansson revealed that the couple’s relationship almost failed to launch.
In fact, after their first date in 2017, Jost was unsure whether Johansson was even interested in seeing him again.
“Honestly, nobody ever asked me out really before,” The Avengers actress explained during the Dec. 1 episode of TODAY with Jenna & Friends. Johansson was previously married to actor Ryan Reynolds (from 2008-2011) and French journalist Romain Dauriac (from 2014-2017), having her daughter, Rose, with her second husband.
“I was a serial monogamist,” she said. “And I just never got the sort of traditional like, ‘Hey, would you like to have dinner sometime?’”
Jost, it seems, was the exception.
“He actually asked me out on a date,” the Black Widow star said. “We went to an Italian restaurant in the East Village. It was a lovely date. We had dinner at like 8 p.m. or whatever.”
As dinner wrapped up, the SNL star invited Johansson to grab a drink with him and some friends he had planned to meet. But Johansson, who felt she was inexperienced in first dates, declined, ending the date.
“I hadn’t dated basically ever, so I was just like, ‘I have to go now. I need to leave,’” she recalled.
Instead, Johansson returned home only about 90 minutes after the date began to relieve her babysitter, who was watching her daughter, Rose.
“She was like, ‘Why are you home?’ And I was like, ‘I went on this date and it was—’ I just felt so flustered,” Johansson said.
Jost—who Johansson tied the knot with in October 2020—eventually told his now-wife that he thought she wasn’t into him.
“Later, he was like, ‘I totally thought that was it. You were acting so weird,’” Johansson said. “I panicked. I don’t know.”
Jost says he had been smitten with Johansson since first meeting her in 2006 on the set of SNL when she hosted for the first time.
In his book, A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir, Jost wrote that he first met Johansson when he was 23 and she was 20, but he could tell she was “beautiful, smart, sweet and intimidatingly sophisticated” and had “a grace and a smile that I’ve still never seen in any other human.”
“She claims that she remembers thinking I was ‘cute,’ but I know what I looked like and that’s not the word I would have used,” the comedian wrote of their first interaction. “(‘Shaggy’ would have been generous. ‘Slovenly,’ more accurate).”
At the time, Johansson was dating her former co-star and love interest from The Black Dahlia, Josh Hartnett. She would date other notable names, like Sean Penn, before her first date with Jost in 2017.
The pair announced their engagement in May 2019 and tied the knot in a small, private ceremony in October 2020.
On the Today show, Johansson also revealed the only other date she had been on, which was a blind date that went badly.
“There were many weird things that happened. And we were going off to this other party and I just sort of vanished,” Johansson said of the one time she had left a date without saying goodbye.
“I think he may have met his future wife at that party. I hope so,” she added.
