Halfway through a news conference held to promote her latest movie, The Island, Scarlett Johansson reminds journalists assembled in a New York hotel’s ballroom that she is only 20 years old.

It’s a fact that’s perhaps easy to overlook in the wake of her three Golden Globe nominations and more than a dozen critics-group nominations and awards for performances in movies like Ghost World, Lost in Translation, The Girl With the Pearl Earring, and last year’s A Love Song for Bobby Long.

In Hollywood’s endless supply of cutie-pies, Johansson appears to be playing Meryl Streep to a cavalcade of Meg Ryans.

The Island, which opens Friday (July 22), is her first venture into big-budget “popcorn” movies. In it, she plays Jordan Two Delta, a woman who lives in a futuristic complex in which the citizens exchange their cooperation with the bullying authorities for an opportunity to win a lottery and be relocated to an island paradise.

One of their number, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor), is having terrible dreams in which he wins the lottery but subsequently drowns. The dreams lead him to the truth about the island and an attempt to save Jordan when her number is called.

Johansson’s reference to being 20 comes when she’s asked if she is satisfied with her career. “I hope to be constantly searching for satisfaction,” she says. “It is good to be satisfied, but I don’t want to stop being curious about things. I think you get to a point in your life where you have a family and you are comfortable, but I never want to be too comfortable. I am saying that now as a 20-year-old girl, but ask me in 35 years and I will probably say that all I want is to be comfortable.”

Johansson started her film career at the age of 10 with North and three years later won an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the critically acclaimed indie Manny & Lo. At the age of 14, she won a nomination from the Chicago Film Critics Association for her performance as a girl traumatized by an accident in The Horse Whisperer. She says that when she received the screenplay for The Island from director Michael Bay, she momentarily forgot that the kinds of movies that Bay has directed (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, The Rock) require actors to do things not usually called for in low-budget indies.

“When you read a script and it says ‘slides down a drainpipe’, you don’t think that is going to happen. Then Michael comes to you at 7:30 in the morning and says, ‘See, it’s easy; you just slide down this drainpipe and then we’ll do it again and again from other angles.’ Some days were really long, and I would look at Michael and say, ‘I can’t do it again,’ and he would look at me and say, ‘Just one more’ and ‘You can do it; I know you can.’?”

Johansson did what she was told, but it didn’t always work out as planned. “I almost lost an eye doing a scene on a scaffold,” she says. “And I had a permanently blue knee from a scene where I had to crawl on the sidewalk. There was so much action going on in the background of the scene that I had to just keep crawling. It takes 20 minutes to put it all back in place, and the first a.d. [assistant director] was screaming at everyone to get back in their places. You do that and then you can’t take the time [to repair yourself]. So you go through it all in agony, and that was hard.”

Johansson isn’t expecting to do many more action films. She says that she doesn’t want to do a lot of films in that genre during her career, which looks like it will be a long one. “I love watching genre films if they are really good,” she says. “They do the trick, in that they remove you from your life for a couple of hours. But I had never found a script that was good enough, because you know that if you are going to do an action film or a science-fiction film you have to do the right one. It is not like you can do tons of them. This film was interesting to me because I know Michael does these movies so well. He is one of about two or three people who can do them well. I felt if I was going to make this kind of movie I should get it right.”