Poised Portman is pretty perfect
- From: The Sunday Telegraph
- November 04, 2007
NATALIE Portman thinks she’s boring. Her legions of fans – from the geekiest Star Wars enthusiast to her raft of industry admirers such as Mike Nichols and Woody Allen – know better.
Talented, beautiful, fiercely intelligent (even kooky) but boring? Never.
Let her elaborate, however, and you see that, of course, she’s right. Portman, 26, is comparing herself to her peers – those actors and entertainers who are her age on paper, but light years away in maturity, elegance and poise.
Case in point, her one-time friend Britney Spears, who appeared with Portman in the 1992 off-Broadway play Ruthless!. Both went on to mega-fame and both would later shave their heads – Portman for work, and Spears, well, you know.
Seen through the lens of such stars-gone-wild, and the tabloid machine that feeds on them, Portman may well be mundane, at least in public. “I think I’ve presented myself convincingly enough as boring,” she says with a smile.
“People have given up hope of any salacious stories coming out of my world.” Which isn’t to say that Portman hasn’t lived it up; she just did (and does) it away from the glare of the paparazzi.
“I feel lucky that I went through my formative years without that tabloid frenzy. It’s not as though I was some crazy wild child, but everyone has had their drunken night or walk of shame.
Something you wouldn’t want to be caught on camera doing – whether it’s picking your nose or showing your crotch.”
Perched on a chair in a suite at New York’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, Portman gives off an aura of class. She looks like someone who’s never picked her nose in her life.
On screen, she often has an impish quality, but in person, clad in black jeans, T-shirt and ballet flats, she’s all style.
Despite her small frame, Portman isn’t one of those lollipop-ladies, with a big head bobbing atop a too-skinny body. She looks more beautiful in real life, but her hypnotic appeal goes deeper.
Her eyes sparkle with knowledge. She’s sporting a fair bit of make-up, having arrived straight from a photoshoot, but once she starts chatting and laughing, it’s obvious that she’d forgo the war paint if she could.
The girl who made her name as a Lolita-like teenstar is all grown up.
But she still makes time for kid stuff. In her new movie, Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Portman plays the insecure manager of a magical toy store owned by Dustin Hoffman as Mr Magorium.
Lined up alongside her most recent roles – as an artist’s muse in Goya’s Ghosts, an American in Israel in Free Zone and a freedom-fighter’s sidekick in V for Vendetta – playing an awkward shopgirl in a kids’ movie seems light-going.
Portman doesn’t see easing up on the heavy stuff as a calculated move, however.
“I don’t know about a break, because you obviously want to put as much energy into everything you do. But the nice thing was, the film I’d done right before this was the Goya film, which involved so much research. This was a lot of work, but it was all from my imagination.”
Mr Magorium also involved a new way of working with her co-stars. Not used to improvisation, Portman found herself faced with Dustin Hoffman, who “doesn’t just take what’s written on the page as necessarily the way it has to be. He’ll play with it. He’s always creating.”
Portman is no stranger to working with topnotch talent. From actors Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Clive Owen and Jude Law, to directors George Lucas, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen and Anthony Minghella, all her peers rave about her talent and dedication – particularly Nichols, who directed her in Closer and has become her mentor.
“It confuses people to think that someone so completely beautiful could really be a first-rate actor, too,” Nichols says. “It’s hard to grasp, but it’s happened.”
It’s something audiences have been trying to reconcile since the beginning of Portman’s career. At the age of nine, she was discovered while eating at a Long Island pizza shop by a Revlon scout who asked her if she wanted to be a model.
She didn’t – but she did want to act. Two years later, she had a lead role in The Professional, Luc Besson’s controversial film about a hit man and the little girl he takes under his wing.
At 13, Portman exuded charisma, but her family was cautious of the inevitable unwanted attention the movie would bring.
Portman’s parents were fiercely protective, changing her real name – Natalie Hershlag – and putting in place firm boundaries about how many drags on a cigarette she could take in the film and how many times she could swear.
As her career quickly blossomed (with roles in Heat and Beautiful Girls), her folks kept her out of the spotlight after-hours, allowing her to grow up as normally as possible on Long Island.
As an only child, Portman says she wished for a sibling.
She didn’t get her wish but, between school terms, she often found a similar family atmosphere on movie sets, especially as Queen Amidala in the Star Wars trilogy of prequels, shot in Australia.
As Star Wars was making Portman a bona fide star all over the globe, the actor refused to rest on her laurels, earning a bachelor degree in psychology at Harvard University.
There, she proved as adept at hitting the books as she was in front of the camera, with one professor offering her a job as his research assistant.
Focusing on an education away from the movie industry was a given for Portman, although her ‘summer job’ did play on her mind when choosing to major in psychology.
“I knew that if I were to continue with acting, it would be helpful.” She admits to briefly considering a career as a psychologist but, ultimately, she stuck with acting.
As she suspected, the degree comes in handy. “Basically, psychology is like trying to figure out how and why people do the things they do, think the things they think, believe the things they believe, feel the things they feel… And acting’s the same.”
Here, and at other points in our conversation, Portman’s voice becomes softer as her sentence winds down, as if signalling the end of a particular topic. Who knows, perhaps it’s a psychological trick she picked up in college.
For Mr Magorium, Portman learnt to play the piano. She has also, in recent years, taken ballet and Spanish lessons. “Sometimes I feel a bit like an Upper East Side kindergartener, with all my classes,” she says with a smile.
“But it’s something really great about the position I’m arbitrarily lucky enough to be in; that I have a lot of free time and, luckily, I’m financially OK. It’s nice to have the luxury of thinking, how am I going to spend my time?”
God forbid Portman should spend some of that free time slacking off. “I could play video games,” she says of the stretches between films, “and no judgment on that – but it’s just not something I enjoy doing.”
She laughs then, as she does throughout our interview, offsetting her otherwise serious and whip-smart manner.
What she does enjoy is travelling and meeting new people away from the glare of Hollywood. Her real friends have nine-to-five jobs, she says, making time at home often lonely.
“I remember being in Ireland for a long weekend,” she says of the period she sported a buzz cut for her role in V for Vendetta opposite a masked Hugo Weaving.
“I knocked on somebody’s door to ask for directions and they seemed really scared. I assumed it had something to do with my shaved head, but maybe they just didn’t like opening their door to a stranger.” Another laugh.
“It’s hard to tell if it’s them reacting to you, or it’s you reading into other people differently,” she says. “But I definitely felt tougher.”
Even with locks back down to her shoulders, Portman is no pushover. She’s consistently refused to talk about her personal life, never confirming rumours that linked her to men such as Moby, Lukas Haas and – most significantly, until recently – Gael García Bernal.
Current gossip has her linked to model/designer Nathan Bogle, but Portman politely declines to comment. (Days later, she’s snapped kissing Bogle in the stands at the US Open.)
In the past, she joked that the only man in her life was Charlie, her dog. But when I ask about him, she pulls a sad but sweet face. “My dog died.”
I’m so sorry, I tell her. “That’s OK. I’m sorry, too. I love dogs. They’re better than people.” She’s smiling, as if only half serious, but for someone as private as she is, it’s a telling comment.
Perhaps she’s more comfortable talking about fashion. After all, Portman is widely regarded as a fashion icon. Just not by herself. “I don’t really believe that fashion exists,” she says, then laughs, as if the joke’s on me and every other person who sees her as stylish.
From the red carpet to the street, Portman’s style is classic, with a bit of a quirk, somewhere between Kate Moss and Nicole Kidman. Fashion designer Zac Posen considers her his muse, she regularly tops the best-dressed lists and she’s appeared on the cover of US Vogue three times.
“I definitely don’t feel like a fashion icon,” she says, although she’ll admit to feeling more glamorous when dolled up for an awards show. But it’s kind of dangerous, because then you go home. And when you wake up the next day and see your zits in the mirror, you just feel horrible.
The contrast is almost too much to take. Putting that much energy into appearance makes you pay more attention to it the next day, when normally you wouldn’t.”
Being the good psychology major that she is, Portman can’t resist taking this rather superficial discussion deeper. “The thing that’s good is that dressing up can be transformative. But there are also other ways that are just as powerful to make you feel that sort of confidence.”
Never comfortable to dwell solely in the land of fashion and celebrity, Portman admits that in addition to travel and education, her charity work is one way she offsets the superficiality of her job. “I get to meet people from different places around the world.”
In 2004 and 2005, she travelled to Uganda, Guatemala and Ecuador as an Ambassador of Hope for FINCA International, an organisation that provides financial services to entrepreneurs in poverty-stricken areas, so they can create jobs and improve their standard of living.
Far from being a mere poster child for a cause, Portman knows her stuff and chose the issue carefully.
“I wanted to focus on one thing,” she says. “Because, as a celebrity, you’re asked to do different things all the time.
“They’re all worthy, but I think you can be more effective if you concentrate your efforts in one place. What I really liked about the concept of microfinance is that it’s a sustainable way to help solve poverty.”
As she delves into the specifics, she never sounds as if she’s jumped on her soapbox. She’s articulate and her passion is genuine.
“Most importantly,” she says of FINCA’s work, “it gives people a sense of accomplishment and agency in their own lives. Ultimately, people desire to create their own success; they don’t want to wait for somebody to help them.”
It makes sense that Portman would choose to support such an evolved strategy.
For all her beauty, what makes you reluctant to stand up after sitting and talking to her at length is her poise, and the way she talks intelligently without sounding snobby or preachy – even when she’s trying to deny her status as a fashion icon.
“I do believe that beauty can be life-improving,” she says. “I love aesthetics, whether it’s a painting or a beautiful fabric or nature…” she stops for another laugh, this time at the way she’s gesturing out the window, to the grey cityscape of Manhattan.
“I say ‘nature’ as I point to lots of not-nature, but I think appreciating those things can add a lot. ‘Fashion’ is just trying to make people believe something that was cool last week isn’t cool any more – so you’ll buy something new. It’s commerce.”
Her serious face breaks into a grin. “And commerce is not necessary for happy living.” SM
