Fame, Love & Surviving Hollywood
The Oscar winner opens up about her struggles as a child star and her happy life now – as she takes on one of her wildest roles yet
It’s been 25 years since Natalie Portman, then 13, made her big-screen debut as a hit man’s apprentice in 1994’s The Professional. Since then she has filmed in such exotic locations as Tunisia ( Star Wars: Episode I) and a national park in Iceland ( Thor: The Dark World), but for her latest movie Vox Lux (out Feb. 21), in which she plays a troubled pop star, she found herself in a familiar place: Long Island, New York, where she grew up. “The hotel we filmed in was where I went to bar mitzvahs,” says Portman, 37. “The studio where we filmed a concert was around the corner from my high school. It felt like a homecoming to me. That familiarity makes you feel that much more free.”
In recent years Portman seems much more free in every sense of the word. Though she has
long guarded her privacy, she’s in a comfortable, confident groove with both her eclectic career and her life off screen. “I’m always trying to find something I don’t get to do in my normal life,” she says of acting. Lately the Harvard grad has taken on challenging parts from Jackie Kennedy to the glitter-bedecked singer of Vox Lux. She has also settled into the role of wife and mother. In 2012 she married French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, 41, after he taught her ballet on the set of 2010’s Black Swan (for which she won an Oscar). The duo, parents to son Aleph, 7, and daughter Amalia, nearly 2, now live in Los Angeles, where Millepied runs a dance company and Portman supports organisations that promote animal rights, education for women and children, and the Time’s Up movement.
Portman was born in Jerusalem to Avner, a fertility specialist, and Shelley, a homemaker, who moved to America when she was 3. She began performing at theatre camps before The Professional launched her movie career. But aspects of her early fame were troubling. At the Women’s March last January, Portman revealed that her first piece of fan mail was a rape fantasy written by a man. “I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually I would feel unsafe and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort,” she said. “I felt the need to cover my body and to inhibit my expression and my work in order to send my own message to the world that I’m someone worthy of safety and respect.” Years later she’s come to terms with the situation. “I know I was sexualised in the ways that I was photographed or portrayed, and that was not my doing,” she says. “That becomes a part of your public identity.”
Portman sparked controversy talking about the topic recently: She said she was “confused” as a teenager when she saw Jessica Simpson on a magazine cover saying she was a virgin and posing in a bikini. When Simpson complained about being shamed, Portman apologised and clarified that she wasn’t criticising Simpson. “I was talking about the confusion I felt seeing the messages that I felt the media was sending out to young girls,” she says.
She found her Vox Lux character Celeste, a pop icon who survived childhood trauma only to battle drug and alcohol addictions, very relatable. “She is such a wild character, but she’s also someone that I felt was a real person, who is the product of this life that has happened to her,” Portman says. “She’s anchored by all these relationships, people who profit from her.” Portman loved re-teaming with her husband, who choreographed the dance numbers. “We have such a shorthand because he knows me so well both as a person and also in terms of my strengths and limitations as a dancer,” she says. “He’s the kindest to work with. He’s very encouraging and gentle.” Their kids, while not fully aware that their mother is famous, do know what she does for a living. “They haven’t seen my movies yet because I think it’s scary for them to see me as anything other than Mom, but they’ve seen me in costume, so they’ve had a glimpse,” she says.
As for what she enjoys most when she’s off-set? “Just being with my family,” she says. “And when I get to sleep!”