Natalie Portman hopes her Thor: The Dark World heroine will inspire all women

Harvard graduate Natalie Portman wants to inspire young women to learn with her geeky, gutsy heroine in Thor: The Dark World.

Chris Hemsworth, portraying superhero Thor, and Natalie Portman, portraying Jane Foster in Thor: The Dark

Natalie Portman is primed to talk all things Thor, the god of Thunder, the crown prince of Asgard, Marvel's latest comic book superhero blockbuster now hitting the big screen.

But she has other things on her mind.

There's the real life terrorist attacks on Israelis in Bulgaria, Mossad's handling of 'Prisoner X' and European crime cartels and their transnational movement of drugs as the source of ruination for today's youth.

These are not the usual topics actors know or want to get in to, but then there is nothing usual about Natalie Portman.

Which is why demand is high - from all quarters - for the 32-year-old Academy Award-winning actor, with the Harvard University degree in psychology, part-time lecturer in counter-terrorism and speaker of four languages including Hebrew, Arabic and French.

The mother of one is also a published researcher with one paper with simply titled "the frontal lobe activation during object permanence data from near-infra-red spectroscopy".

It is also perhaps why she is perfectly cast as Jane Foster in Marvel's Thor franchise.

In the second movie, Thor: The Dark World, she returns as the somewhat geeky astrophysicist well enough grounded enough to keep the character real and audiences engaged in what is otherwise
an other-worldly fusion of Nordic legend and childlike fantasies or nightmares, depending on your age.

"I was really worried, I thought, 'Oh my god, its going to be like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or something'. I'm going to be like this Silicon Valley girl walking among all these actors speaking like gods in faux Shakespeare," she says of her character.

But thankfully she doesn't come across like that, rather as one of only a handful of contemporary Earth-based characters in the cast with the sorts of end-of-the-world reactions most people would have, albeit ones that have already overcome the shock
of hammer-throwing gods
from another dimension during an earlier encounter (Marvel's 2011 Thor).

In Thor The Dark World the latest instalment, Foster again meets up with Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to whom she was intensely attracted in the first film. But it's two years since they have seen each other when After two years apart they are faced with the return of a dark force led by Malekith the Accursed (Christopher Eccleston) and his horde of evil elves.

You get why Portman would play Padme in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, she was in high school and, hey, it was Star Wars, the then greatest franchise ever created, but why Thor?

There are two reasons and both go to who she is.

"I am interested in this genre's appeal absolutely, because it is a form of real, old-fashioned entertainment," says Portman, who played Padme in three Star Wars prequels.

"I mean it's a spectacle, and it can be operatic in scale and the storytelling is about creating an entire world, and there is this level of craftsmanship that doesn't exist in movies any more. To get to be part of that is really exciting."

On the second reason she explains firstly that she is no comic book geek.

"I'm ashamed to say I'm not," she replies when asked if she followed these comic book storylines as a youth.

"I feel like comic girl geeks are the most interesting usually. They are like smart interesting girls who read comic books and get into these kind of worlds that these kind of movies deal with. Unfortunately I'm not that interesting. That wasn't the world I inhabited - I read a lot and I was really like into The Baby Sitters Club."

The latter reference is to the hugely popular Ann M. Martin series about a group of 13-year-old girls setting up a club.

So to Portman's second point it was about being Jane Foster, a fast-talking physicist with an open mind to other unearthly variables, and what she could provide those aspiring to be less comic book geek and more academic.

Portman is keen to inspire those who aspire to be less comic book geek and more academic.

"You know when you take these parts, millions of girls are going to watch that," she says her character, a fast-talking physicist with an open mind to other unearthly variables.

"It doesn't go deep, but those type of characters but hopefully can have an effect.

"What you think is possible is from what you see in films. They help you dream and help you see what are possibilities. Not to overstate it, because it's not exactly the Marie Curie story, but you know what I mean."

But apparently it is enough. One of the film's tie-ins saw Marvel partner with the US National Academy of Science and Girl Scouts USA to create a competition for girls to explore science, technology, engineering and maths, with the winning video entry to feature as a short for the US premiere screening of Thor.

You get the sense it would have been the kind of thing Portman would have entered as a teenager.

Born in Israel, Portman moved to the US with her parents when she was three. She went to Jewish schools before attending theatre dance workshops in New York. She had always performed and danced ballet as a child but did not see either avenue as a career. In 1994, however, she starred as an orphan alongside Jean Reno and Gary Oldman in Luc Besson's thriller Leon: The Professional.

It would be easy to say she never looked back, but clearly she did and went on to Harvard University to pursue an academic-based career.

In 2003 she reportedly said she didn't mind if study ruined her acting since, "I'd rather be smart than a movie star".

No doubt given where her career has since led, and the people she mixes with, it's not a quote she likes to recall.

"It's not the worst thing in the world," she says.

"I think there are bigger issues in life so I would not want to be complaining about that at all. But obviously what attracts me and most of my colleagues (to acting) is the creativity, the expression and the collaboration with other artists and that's the core of what
we do."

She says signing up for the Marvel comic books was an easy choice. She also rejects claims she tried and she rejects outright claims made that she madeto break contract and refused to do another movie after Marvel dumped her director friend and director Patty Jenkins from Thor: The Dark World.

And unlike the second Star Wars trilogy, buying into the Thor franchise was like starting anew, without the expectations from generational Jedi fans.

Nope, but NatalieHowever, Portman wants to get back to discussing serious issues of the day. She has a hunger to know facts, to follow the news and current affairs and not let a role or her acting take her too far away from what is real.

"The one great thing that school gave me was the ability to learn whatever I'm interested in now and to go after it when you have a question to continue that curiosity and that path," she says.

SEE THOR: THE DARK WORLD OPENS TODAY