Natalie Portman is one of the actors on the cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue. I enjoyed Natalie in May December, and I enjoyed the film overall. I wish Charles Melton had gotten some big nominations but I wasn’t surprised that Natalie and Julianne Moore were largely snubbed. Still, Natalie and Charles both ended up on the VF cover, which meant that they both got stand-alone profiles in the magazine. Natalie chatted with VF about the film, about how she’s not really a Method actress, but she also said some interesting stuff about the bifurcation of her identity. VF asks about her marriage too – last year, the French tabloids caught Benjamin Millepied engaged in an affair with a young Frenchwoman, and reportedly Natalie and Benjamin are sort of separated and maybe even getting a divorce (no one has filed anything though). Some highlights from VF:
Dealing with the public interest in her life: “I got very protective of it very early on. I chose a different name when I started, which was kind of an interesting way that I separated identities. I would get upset if someone at school called me Natalie Portman. I was like, if you know me, you know me as Natalie Hershlag at school. It was kind of an extreme bifurcation of identity that I’ve tried to integrate a little bit more as an adult. I felt like it was not accepting that both were part of me, that there wasn’t a “real” me and a “pretend” me, and that they didn’t necessarily have different names… As I started having kids and a family, I started realizing that maybe it was not helpful to be like, there’s two of me. I have many interactions during my day as a public person. To exclude that from my experience is not real.
On people writing about her marriage: “It’s terrible, and I have no desire to contribute to it.
Living in Paris & LA: “I find them very complementary cities. I love having both in my life. I lead a very non-Hollywood life in LA. I live on the east side. I have some friends who are in the entertainment industry, but many friends who are not, and we don’t do industry things when we hang out. We’re not going to Hollywood parties, we’re having dinners at home in the backyard. I actually found that living there made my experience of LA much less “Hollywood.” When I would visit, it would only be for work, and I’d be staying somewhere in Beverly Hills, and I’d be having industry meetings and going to industry parties. Living there made my experience much more rounded and appreciative of all the city has to offer, from nature to the arts, food to music, and of course, the people. And Paris, of course, is just a dream. I’m so lucky to get to live here and have an enormously stimulating city life with incredible friends.
Watching Hollywood change: “The striking thing has been the decline of film as a primary form of entertainment. It feels much more niche now. If you ask someone my kids’ age about movie stars, they don’t know anyone compared to YouTube stars, or whatever. There’s a liberation to it, in having your art not be a popular art. You can really explore what’s interesting to you. It becomes much more about passion than about commerce. And interesting, too, to beware of it becoming something elitist. I think all of these art forms, when they become less popularized, you have to start being like, okay, who are we making this for anymore? And then amazing, too, because there’s also been this democratization of creativity, where gatekeepers have been demoted and everyone can make things and incredible talents come up. And the accessibility is incredible. If you lived in a small town, you might not have been able to access great art cinema when I was growing up. Now it feels like if you’ve got an internet connection, you can get access to anything. It’s pretty wild that you also feel like at the same time, more people than ever might see your weird art film because of his extraordinary access. So it’s this two-sided coin.
She loves word games: “I do a lot of word games. I really like all the New York Times crossword and Connections and Wordle and Spelling Bee. Actually, Julianne [Moore] is also a word-game obsessive. And she gets Queen Bee almost every day. I mean, I thought I was already impressed by what a good actress she was, but that will really top it for me.
I like what she says here about the democratization of art and how people have greater access to a wider variety of all kinds of films and television shows, and that people can “come up” in different ways. That’s all true. But… there are still gatekeepers and films are not “niche” entertainment. But I get what she’s saying. Gen Z experiences TV, films and “content” so differently than the generations before them. I like what she says about living in LA – she’s not an LA-basher and I do think that’s because she actually lives there and she’s not just flying in for work.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Vanity Fair.