“I was sexualized as a child”

Natalie Portman, Oscar winner and Hollywood star since childhood, looks back on her early years in the film industry with mixed feelings. In an open conversation with acting colleague Jenna Ortega, the now 43-year-old talked about the pressure who is on young actresses-especially if they were sexualized early on by the outside world.

Natalie Portman: “It scared me”

Portman gained international fame with her role in “Léon-Der Profi” (1994, by Luc Besson), in which she played alongside the then 34-year-old Jean Reno at the time. Today she finds the film “repulsive”. In retrospect, she says in an interview with Ortega for “Interview Magazine”: “I think there is a public picture of me that is different from what I really am.”

She describes how she alienated from others as a child: “I have already talked about it a bit – about how I was really sexualized as a child, what, I think, happens to many young girls who have been seen in the film. It was very afraid of it.”

For Portman, this early experience in industry was formative – and led to it that she was deliberately serious image to protect herself. “Of course, sexuality is also part of being a child, but I wanted it to stay in me and not to me. And I felt that my way to protect myself was to say: ‘I’m totally serious. I’m super hard. I am clever, and that’s not the kind of girl you attack.’

This strategy worked for her, at least publicly. “I thought that if I created this picture of myself, I would be left alone. That shouldn’t be necessary, but it worked.” Nevertheless, this picture led to a kind of double life that Jenna Ortega (“Wednesday”) explained. “I think that’s the reason why I can be stupid and silly in real life, but people think that I am this super serious, read person. I am actually not particularly withdrawn in real life – I tell you everything here – but it was clear very early: If you show people how discrete you are, your privacy will be respected much more.”

For this reason, she claims to draw clear limits – for example when it comes to her family – and categorically rejects photos with her children for the public. Despite her early success in the 90s, Portman retired from the spotlight between 1999 and 2003 to study psychology at Harvard University. She closed with a bachelor. However, a lot of information about this time is not known for the outside world.

That is why Portman decidedly declined the role in “Lolita”

A special decision of her youth was the conscious rejection of the leading role in “Lolita” (1997), a remake of the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov by director Adrian Lyne. “I met the director, but I immediately told him that I would not make this film under any circumstances,” she told Los Angeles Times in 1996. “Stanley Kubrick filmed the book in 1962 because nothing was actually shown, but this film was more explicitly thought. He said you were to use body doubles, but I replied: ‘People will still think that I am, so no, thank you’.”

Public commitment and clear attitude

Portman is consistently strong for feminist topics, and emphasizes that there are still too few strong female roles in the film industry in their eyes. At the Oscar award ceremony in 2020, she wore a black cloak, in the hem of which the names of directors were embroidered, which in her opinion should also have been nominated.

In the context of the #Metoo movement, the “Black Swan” actress also made a public position: In an interview, she stood behind Dylan Farrow, who accuses her adoptive father and director Woody of all sexual abuse in her childhood. Portman clear: “I believe you, Dylan.”

There was another public conflict with musicians and producer Moby in 2019. In his autobiography “Then It Fell Apart” he claimed to have had dates with the Portman, 14 years younger – a presentation that she decidedly rejected them. She called his statements “disturbing” and emphasized that she only knew him briefly and did not want or did not want to have a romantic relationship with him. Moby then publicly apologized to her and also canceled the reading tour.