LOS ANGELES — Scarlett Johansson spent countless hours whipping her body into top shape to play the Black Widow in "Iron Man 2," but she was less than thrilled with how the tabloids portrayed her devotion to the highly-anticipated sequel.
"I wanted to do a lot of my stunts and to be believable as this superspy, so I started getting fit and eating well and feeling really good," the 25-year-old actress explains to Glamour. "But then there was this rumor mill cranking out stories that I had lost 14 pounds—I could never lose 14 pounds—and was on some miracle diet. I just thought it was ridiculous. I was working my ass off, but I was doing it on my own terms and certainly through no miracle diet."
Johansson responded to the crash diet claims by writing a response on The Huffington Post.
"I hate seeing these ridiculous articles where [tabloids] guess someone's weight. But they approach it as fact! I'm sick of it as a woman—not just as a person on the other side of it. As a reader. I got fed up," she says.
Johansson says she deals with the pressure to look good in Hollywood by being realistic.
"I can't look at somebody who is 6 feet tall and 120 pounds and say, I'm going to get that body. That's just never going to happen," she explains. "You have to work with what you've got."
The "Lost in Translation" star also dishes on marrying actor Ryan Reynolds last September, admitting that her trip to the altar just felt like a natural step.
"I never really thought about getting married – it just kind of happened," she says. "It seemed natural, the right thing to do. It was kind of a celebration of the time."
While she says not much has changed since tying the knot, Johansson does enjoy the bond she now shares with her husband.
"I think the only difference is that I'm kind of making my own little family now, which is funny. It's like a little bit of a tribe," she says. "You hope that a relationship makes you better, that you learn things about yourself. You've had this one view, and now you have another view. I feel more confident to explore things within myself that I hadn't thought about in the past."
Johansson is currently in the midst of promoting her second album, a string of duets with Pete Yorn titled "Break Up." Johansson had previously worked with both of Yorn's brothers and says she got a random text one day inquiring about a joint album. She laughs when she recalls how Yorn had no idea about her skills outside of acting.
Remembers Johansson: "When I started singing along to the songs he was playing me, he said, 'I'm really happy that you can sing!'"