No, the “Black Widow” is not in Russia – it’s just her lookalike.
A Russian TikToker, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Marvel actress Scarlett Johansson, has said she “wants her own life” after being mistaken for the actress multiple times.
“There are people on the internet who confuse me with Scarlett, but I’m not pretending to be her,” Ekaterina Shumskaya, 24, who goes by the name Kate, told Caters News. “We just look alike.”
However, she has 10.2 million followers on TikTok, and sometimes some of them are fooled into thinking that she is actually the acclaimed actress.
“On social media, I often get thanked for the great acing in the movie ‘Black Widow’,” she told Caters.
“My followers always ask me if I’ve ever talked to her or if Scarlett knows if I exist,” she said, according to the Mirror.
Now, thanks to her convincing appearance, she has been able to become a model and moved from her hometown of Maykop to Moscow earlier this year.
She first learned that she shared similar characteristics to the actress when she was in school at around 12 years old when some classmates commented on her odd resemblance.
“I was really surprised,” she said. “I’ve known I look like him for a while, but I haven’t really thought about it.”
While it might seem like an ideal life, she claimed it’s not as easy as it looks — look-alike modeling can be rare.
She also bears the brunt of some of the backlash the real Johansson, 37, faces due to her lookalike appearance. When the actress was accused of whitewashing an Asian character in “Ghost in the Shell,” Shumskaya received some of the hate mail, with some even threatening to “kill her.”
“I want to live my own life, not Scarlett’s,” she said, according to the Mirror, despite dressing up as the ‘Avengers’ star for TikTok videos.
But her surprising look-alike features are what keeps her going – earning enough to support herself and her parents – after racking up views and following her first TikTok cosplay under the popular Russian hashtag #whodoilooklike, a she declared.
Prior to her transition into modeling and content creation, she was earning $700 a month, which worried her parents when she said she wanted to pursue modeling.
“I was getting tired of my job and I thought it wasn’t bringing in the income I thought I deserved,” she said of her previous job as a construction sales manager. . “I woke up one morning and thought, ‘My youth is beyond me and no one will notice me soon. “”
But that’s not Shumskaya’s only modeling attempt. She first tried it at 17, becoming “quite popular” in her region of Russia, but was put off by the negative comments and messages she received online.
To truly succeed, however, the model said she’d have to leave Russia to pursue a career as a cosplayer, but she’s making the attempt anyway.
Her followers once encouraged her to go to the Moscow premiere of ‘Black Widow’ dressed as Johansson, but she seems capable of convincing anyone that she was the star of the film.
“I got dressed and went down to downtown with a photographer, but no one came to see me,” said Shumskaya, who claimed to be anonymous, according to the Mirror. “People looked at me like I was a weirdo.”
