Mark Ruffalo Answers Sexist Questions for Scarlett Johansson

Typically while doing press rounds for any film that’s perceived as male-oriented, actresses are often asked the dumbest, most sexist questions over and over and over again, while their male co-stars get to answer the awesome questions. Women get asked about their diets, outfits and makeup, while men are asked about filming action sequences and their opinion about the film’s headier concepts. But one very clever reporter flipped the script in a recent interview with Avengers: Age of Ultron stars Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson, and the results are hilarious.

Cosmopolitan UK sat down for an interview with Johansson and Ruffalo, in which the reporter decided it would be fun to reverse things a bit, asking Johansson great questions about her stunt work and the action sequences, allowing the actress to deliver thoughtful, longer replies. Meanwhile, Ruffalo has to suffer through questions about his diet and exercise regimen, fashion, posing on the red carpet, and exhaustive makeup and costumes. Both actors are very game and very charming, joking with and poking fun at one another, while legitimately embracing the gimmick — though it’s kind of a bummer that this has to be a gimmick at all.

It’s really annoying (and has to be even more so for the actresses in question) to see women continually asked the same dumb, reductive and sexist questions about superficial stuff, while men always get to answer the cool questions. And following Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner’s unfortunate jokes about Johansson released in an interview released online yesterday, it’s so refreshing and timely for this interview to arrive and make us all feel better about human beings.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (and Johansson’s totally awesome stunts) arrives on May 1.

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