Scarlett Johansson covers the December issue of Interview magazine to promote her new film, We Bought a Zoo, which was directed by Cameron Crowe and has already drawn the ire of PETA. The film also stars Matt Damon, who, oddly enough, has just rubbed shoulders with PETA over his attendance at a bullfighting match. For her part, the magazine notes that Scarlett is coming off a tumultuous year after divorcing Ryan Reynolds (and feeling quite depressed as a result) before rebounding with the likes of Sean Penn and his chain-smoking toupee.

Then there were the infamous tata & booty shots downloaded around the world. Scar really did look good in those photos, didn’t she? Consequently, I’m trying to wrap my head around this photoshoot, which features Scar’s rather trimmed-down Avengers physique and a boyish hairstyle. On one hand, the stylist seems to be aiming for an androgynous vibe, which is somewhat counteracted by Scar’s poses:

On to the interview though, which is conducted by Arianna Huffington and features a lot of talk by Scar on serious subjects. Maybe:

On Being Politically Active: “I’m already planning what I’m going to wear to the next White House Correspondents’ dinner. Next time I go I’m going to find Anderson Cooper’s table and camp out there. My brother was totally geeked-out by Katie Couric. I think he followed her around the entire night. I was chasing after him, and I turned around, and I had a bunch of Republican senators chasing after me. [laughs] But honestly I think it’s the best party in town. I’d rather go to the White House Correspondents’ dinner than any awards show.”

On Balancing Fame & Privacy: “I don’t really profess to know how to balance any of it. I don’t profess to know how to balance the positive and the negative media attention. It’s a gamble every time you put yourself out there, and, certainly, I’m always readjusting to it. But I hope it never becomes normal to feel scrutinized. I value my privacy and my personal life-and I certainly don’t exploit my personal life. But that’s not always in your control. There are, unfortunately, people who are interested in prying. You know, my favorite actors are actors who are enigmatic and mysterious and never make the obvious choice in terms of the projects they do or who they work with or their craft. But I think that the less I know about an actor, the more chance I have of allowing their own persona to kind of slip away so I can get completely lost in the character they’re playing, and the more that people think they know about your personal life, the more difficult it becomes to preserve that. So when I’m not working or promoting something, I try to be as under-the-radar as I can. This has just been a bit of a crazy year.”

On Avoiding Twitter “Personally, I don’t feel the need to brand myself in that way. But as a means to share information and raise awareness of things, I think these social-networking platforms are unprecedented. They’re amazing tools to communicate information-especially about different causes or crises or movements. That said, I don’t have a Facebook or a Twitter account, and I don’t know how I feel about this idea of, ‘Now, I’m eating dinner, and I want everyone to know that I’m having dinner at this time’ or ‘I just mailed a letter and dropped off my kids.’ That, to me, is a very strange phenomenon. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than have to continuously share details of my everyday life. I’m always surprised that certain actors have Twitter accounts.”

On Her Work In Somalia & Kenya: Well, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel with Oxfam several times, and they’re always so well organized, so it was a good way to show the kind of work they’re doing. You read statistics all the time like, “13 million people are at risk because of the severe drought in East Africa,” but I think those kinds of numbers fall on deaf ears-there’s so much devastation in the world, that it’s a bit overwhelming for people. But by seeing a first-hand account of something like the effects of the drought in the Horn of Africa, you can have a different relationship with the story. It’s one of the blessings that come with new media. I’m hoping to go to Ethiopia in February and do a similar kind of project there because it’s an ongoing crisis, so I think it’s important to keep some focus there right now.

“It’s seemingly a whole other world. But in actuality, you’re standing next to somebody, looking them in the eye, and what you realize is that there is a human connectivity that exists between people no matter the cultural difference. You don’t even have to go that far. There are people in America who are absolutely desperate right now, who have no means to support their families, who have no opportunities to better themselves or their education-and they’re not that different from the farmers and working-class people that I visited when I went to Kenya with Oxfam. Whether they’re in America or in Africa, people want to work. They want to have purpose. They want to provide for themselves and their families. They don’t want handouts. They don’t want to be completely dependent on their governments-even though there’s usually no opportunity for that anyway. But they want to be self-sufficient and have a sustainable lifestyle. You know, I just finished this movie, The Avengers, in September, and we shot in places like Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in Cleveland, and around Ohio. We shot in a town called Wilmington in Ohio. It’s a lovely town, and the people there were really generous and welcomed us with open arms, but I’m sure part of that was probably that this film was an opportunity for commerce that they haven’t had for a long time. So these problems sometimes seem so impossibly large that it’s hard not to be pessimistic.”

[From Interview magazine]

Hopefully, Scarlett was just joking about having her outfit all picked out for next year’s White House Correspondents Dinner. Whatever the case, I’m just hoping that the wonk foot makes another appearance at the event. It would be a great annual tradition, you know? But I hate to make fun of Scarlett for what she’s said in this interview because, honestly, she seems to have a better grasp on worldly issues than most starlets these days. I know that it’s really easy to laugh at Scar for fancying herself an intellectual, but she does well here. Mostly.

Photos courtesy of Interview magazine