Portman’s portrayal gets to heart of ‘Jackie’
New York — In the pantheon of specific accents, Jackie Kennedy’s reigns supreme.
So when Natalie Portman signed on to play the former first lady in biopic “Jackie,” she faced the seemingly impossible task of replicating Kennedy’s unusual Mid-Atlantic dialect, marked by discordant, rounded vowels and a hushed, breathy timbre.
“The first day I did it, I could definitely see everyone’s faces like, ‘Uh-oh,’ ” Portman says with a smirk. “It’s quite eccentric, the way she spoke. We toned it down a little bit even from what it really is.”
Director Pablo Larraín was among those worried that Portman’s accent was too over-the-top — that is, until he re-watched Kennedy’s White House tour TV special from 1962, which is painstakingly re-created in the film. “It was hard for me to get used to . . . but then I got it,” Larraín says. The question of, “How long would the audience need to not (be) looking at Natalie, but at Jackie? She achieves that in just a couple of minutes.”
Her portrayal certainly has critics convinced. “Jackie” (in theaters this weekend) boasts 93% positive reviews on aggregate site with 27 of 28 pundits on awards site
predicting Portman will clinch her third Academy Award nomination. She won best actress in 2011, playing a deranged ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.”
Aronofsky, a producer on “Jackie,” brought the project to Portman five years ago. But Noah Oppenheim’s script — an unorthodox account of the week after President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, told from the harrowing perspective of his widow — sat in limbo until last year, when Portman was introduced to Chilean director Larraín, whom she calls “the only filmmaker who could make this movie. He had really interesting ideas and approached every day like a search.”
The actress was similarly his first choice for Kennedy, a fashion icon whose beauty and mystique made her the “most unknown (public figure) of the 20th century,” Larraín says.
“You look at (Kennedy) and it’s very hard to know what’s going on with her, and that’s something that Natalie has,” he says. “She can be elegant, sophisticated, dangerous and do a great performance. But there’s something that’s impossible to explain, which is her mystery. I was after that.”
Portman, 35, says that “time and maturity” helped inform her performance. Coincidentally, she was the same age filming “Jackie” as Kennedy was during the events of the film. And like the first lady — who died of lymphoma at 64 in 1994 — the Oscar winner is famously private when it comes to family. She is married to French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she has a 5-year-old son, Aleph, and is expecting a second child in the spring. (“It’s like I have my own scaffolding,” she jokes, leaning her elbow on her pronounced baby bump as she poses for a portrait.)
“I’m obviously public on a much smaller scale than she was,” Portman says, shyly. But being in the spotlight does make “you aware of your image: how other people view you, how you want them to view you, who you really are, and what parts you want to keep to yourself.
“Obviously,” she adds, “I don’t edit my own interviews like she did. But you can control what you say and don’t say, and what you put out there.”