Natalie Portman: ‘I always wanted to live another life for a moment’

This story is part of the July 14 edition of Sunday Life.See all 14 stories.

In a storied and quite diverse career, actor Natalie Portman has taken a grand jeté from roles like Nina Sayers in Black Swan and the regal, Empire-challenging Queen Amidala in the Star Wars franchise, to a more elegant iteration of the hammer-wielding Thor in the Marvel movies.

Trying to assign a box-office value to her body of work got us to $8 billion with the big-ticket stuff, and not enough time to tally up the rest. She’s not a woman of a million faces, yet the 43-year-old finds the girl in the mirror as challenging as she is compelling.

“I like to think I have quite a strict boundary between who I play and who I am, and that work is an opportunity for me to act out behaviours that are very different from my life,” Portman says. “Because why do anything that I could actually just do in real life?

“I always wanted to be an astronaut or a rock star or a woman who’s really ruthlessly ambitious, things I don’t identify with, where you get the opportunity to dip your toe in another life and live another life for a moment.”

The elaborate make-up and costumes worn by Queen Amidala created a reflection in the mirror quite different to the one Portman usually sees. But a role such as Maddie Schwartz in the new Apple TV+ series, Lady in the Lake, creates a reflection that maintains its familiarity.

“Inevitably you bring yourself and your soul to that, and there’s some kind of connection that draws you through it that you have to also incorporate,” Portman says. “That’s why you have to be careful about what you do, because you can absorb things unconsciously.

“It’s definitely a tug between two extremes: one, that there’s a strict boundary between the role and oneself, and two, that there’s a meshing of role and self. I’d say it’s a tug of war between the two.”

Lady in the Lake is based on the novel of the same name by Laura Lippman, about Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife living in Baltimore in the 1960s. Maddie leaves her family to become an investigative journalist after a series of shocking murders, including that of an 11-year-old girl and a young woman, Cleo Sherwood, whose life is unexpectedly connected to Maddie’s own.

“For a story that’s largely about two women trying to get free, to have women writing that experience is pretty crucial.”

NATALIE PORTMAN

Portman was first approached for the role by the late director, Jean-Marc Vallée, and his producing partner, Nathan Ross. One of Hollywood’s most gifted directors, Vallée’s television work includes two critically acclaimed HBO series, Big Little Lies (2017) and Sharp Objects (2018).

Vallée’s death from cardiac arrhythmia at 58, just prior to the start of filming, was a shock to Hollywood as the Québécois filmmaker had been instrumental in the reshaping and elevation of limited series on television. Many of the jigsaw pieces that make Lady in the Lake work – that it’s an adaptation of a powerfully authentic literary work, and that it has a writer’s room almost entirely powered by women – are hallmarks of Vallée’s approach. In this case, the writing team was led by Alma Har’el, who also directed the series.

“Writers can bring their own experience and their own perspective on the world into the writing,” Portman says. “So, for a story that’s largely about two women trying to get free, to have women writing that experience is pretty crucial. Obviously writers should be able to write about things far outside their experience, but I think there is a special knowledge that a very deep understanding of the lived experience brings.”

Portman says her acting choices are based on knowing she will have an interesting experience.Credit: Jess Ruby James/Trunk Archive/Snapper

The series includes scenes which, in 2024, seem extraordinary. In one, Maddie is unable to sell her car without her husband’s signature. “It is really shocking and almost begs to be fact-checked,” Portman says. “You’re like, no, that’s not possible.”

But this was not Portman’s first encounter with America’s dated gender dynamics. She had been offered, but ultimately turned down, the lead role in Mimi Leder’s 2018 biography On the Basis of Sex, about the life and early cases of trailblazing American litigator Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“One of the details [in that story] was that while Ginsburg was a law professor and fighting in the Supreme Court against discrimination on the basis of gender, she went to interview one of her prospective clients, and couldn’t rent a car without her husband’s signature,” Portman says.

Portman was born in Jerusalem in 1981, but by the age of nine was living in Long Island, New York. She studied ballet and modern dance at the American Theatre Dance Workshop and, at the age of 11, landed a role in the musical Ruthless!, about a girl willing to kill to land the lead in the school play. By her own admission, the real Natalie is not that ambitious.

It also set her on course towards Australia. Baz Luhrmann cast her as Juliet in his 1996 masterpiece Romeo + Juliet but she didn’t stay in the role because she was too young for the weight of the material. She finally made it Down Under to film the second and third Star Wars episodes, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, which were shot in Sydney.

“I don’t have any way of predicting whether something will be lasting, even something like Star Wars.”

NATALIE PORTMAN

It was a complicated period in her life – finishing high school, then turning 21 while filming the Star Wars films, then beginning an academic life at Harvard University. Portman lived in Australia again in 2020/21 while filming Thor: Love and Thunder, this time with her then-husband, Benjamin Millepied (the couple split in 2023), and her two children, son Aleph and daughter Amalia.

Her acting choices, she says, are based on knowing she will have an interesting experience, “because that’s the only thing I can really count on. And then it’s just a beautiful surprise if something actually is meaningful. It’s usually a very belated surprise because you only know after 20 years or so if it’s something that people care about.”

The process, she says, is “very mysterious. [Even] after 30 years of doing this, I don’t have any way of predicting whether something will be lasting, even something like Star Wars, which was already an important cultural touchstone when I became part of it.

“We got such bad reviews when we came out that it felt like, oh god, this might be completely forgotten and discarded,” Portman adds. “And then [it was so pleasing] to see it re-embraced 20 years later, especially by people who were kids when it first came out.”

How her other work will endure is hard to measure. Black Swan remains a masterpiece, and it gave Portman an Academy Award for best actress, not to mention a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award. Other work, such as A Tale of Love and Darkness, which Portman wrote and directed, matter simply because of the depth of her emotional investment.

And a work such as Lady in the Lake speaks to such potent themes – complex shifts in gender equality, antisemitism and racial prejudice in mid-20th century America – that it is easy to feel its impact. Portman took the role because she was drawn to the way it explored the connections between Baltimore’s black and Jewish communities.

“Cities like Baltimore, which were once quite prosperous, then later experienced troubles as industries left … I don’t want to paint too bleak a portrait, but it’s US history in microcosm to explore that story.”

There is also a personal connection. Portman’s grandmother, Bernice Hurwitz, was born in Baltimore. “For my mother’s 70th birthday I did a huge family ancestry project and so much of our family roots were in Baltimore. That’s where my great-grandparents migrated to from Eastern Europe, and they are buried there.”

So, I ask, to misquote Gertrude Stein, if America is Portman’s country, is Baltimore her home town?

“My grandmother was born there and there are still places, like the Jewish deli that’s been there for a hundred years, that I could go into and imagine my great-grandmother buying her meat. It’s really wild to walk those paths that your relatives walked, especially [when] Jewish history is so disconnected because of constant moving.

“So there’s no real continuity of place,” Portman adds. “To have these feelings, like you’re walking where your family once walked, is unique to me in a way that maybe for other people is less so, ‘Of course I walk the streets my grandparents walked every day.’ For me, it’s a rare feeling.” •

Lady in the Lake airs on Apple TV+ on July 19.

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