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 Though traumatic for her character, Portman herself was cool with the buzz cut. |
NEW YORK -- It seems safe to say there's nobody else like Natalie Portman working in the movies.
The Harvard grad speaks five languages, she's studying a few more, and most recently she learned to play the piano and conduct for a film about 18th-century painter Francisco de Goya.
For her latest film, V For Vendetta, which opens Friday, Portman merely had to acquire an English accent, shave her head bald and read Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's autobiography and a smidgen of Antonia Fraser's writing and a few tomes on Guy Fawkes.
Must have been a walk in the park.
As a girl of 13, Portman famously said she was going to college and didn't care if that ruined her acting career because, "I'd rather be
smart than a movie star."
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And now at age 24, she is both.
V For Vendetta is an ambiguous political thriller based on a graphic novel created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd in the 1980s. Fabulously prescient, the story involves terrorism of one sort or another and one man's fight against oppression. The film wraps complex social issues into its exhilarating action sequences and offers, finally, no easy answers.
The story is set in the future in an England in the grips of fascism. Hugo Weaving plays V, a a masked avenger seeking freedom from tyranny. He is charming and he is brilliant and he is a killer.
Portman co-stars as Evey, a fearful young woman who encounters V and becomes his protegee and part of his life, changing her own life in the process. With her in the cast are John Hurt, Stephen Rea, Rupert Graves, Stephen Fry and Sinead Cusack, among others. The Wachowski brothers (The Matrix) wrote the screenplay.
Portman comes to this interview with her hair on end, literally. She is sporting a punkish look that's the begun-to-grow-out result of shaving her head for a scene in V For Vendetta -- an event she describes as liberating and as a welcome departure from vanity. "For my character, it was traumatic," she says. "For me, it was exciting to have that experience, that dramatic change."
The only drawback to the haircut is that it has made Portman more immediately recognizable in public.
"With hair, I can sort of camouflage into people, but when your head is shaved, when you're female, people just sort of naturally stare at you, wondering, 'What's that girl doing?' "
Portman claims her public profile isn't that big yet. "The only place I am recognized all the time is in L.A. and otherwise, it's only about once a day. I feel pretty anonymous," she says.
And so far the paparazzi have left her alone.
"It's not really a problem for me. It seems like they take on the same people all the time, unfortunately for them," Portman says. "I've been lucky enough to have been respected by journalists."
Portman seems to be respected by everybody who crosses her path -- fellow actors, filmmakers, classmates, teachers, friends. She is an unlikely candidate for the world of movie acting and it is a career she came upon almost by chance -- a Revlon rep spotted her in a Long Island pizzeria when Portman was 11 years old. She wasn't very interested in modelling, but the encounter led her to get involved in acting.
Portman is the only child of a doctor and an artist. She was born in Israel and moved to the States when she was four. "Being from Israel was one of the reasons I wanted to do this movie," she says of V For Vendetta, "because terrorism and violence have been such a daily part of my thinking and conversation since I was little ... I think it's important for all of us to question when, if ever, violence is justified, and can we imagine a context in which it is, and what are our thresholds for how oppressive the situation can get before we have to say, 'Enough!' and revolt."
Portman's first film was The Professional, in which she starred with Jean Reno. She was 12. Her screen presence being what it is, she quickly found roles in such films as Beautiful Girls, Heat, Everyone Says I Love You and Mars Attacks! and then, in 1999, she became a global phenom by appearing as Queen Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace.
She may be best known for the Star Wars movies, but Portman has also starred in such films as Anywhere But Here, Garden State, Where The Heart Is, Cold Mountain and Closer, and as she proved in the latter two films, her mere presence tends to elevate the tenor of any movie. She won a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for Closer.
Portman sees film as having an important social function that she describes as practice empathy. "It's two hours of people sitting together in a theatre and leaving their own self-involved consciousness at home and sitting and feeling for another character. There are obviously counter-examples, films that might just be to escape for a little bit, but that's the best possible form -- to have people sitting and getting into the heart and mind of another person, and hopefully taking that into their daily lives."
She continues, "As an actor, my job is to imagine other people's lives, and what better thing to practise than that, to think about what other people experience? It's the most human thing you can hope to practise. But there's so much room for other stuff," she finishes up, "like Wedding Crashers is one of my favourite movies this year, and it didn't exactly make me understand another person's life! It gave me a lot of joy and an escape for a few hours. And that's a great function, too."
Would she ever stop acting?
Portman just laughs. "I definitely think about maybe doing other things some day, but until I do, I've learned not to talk about it. I've been interviewed since I was 12 years old, so I've left a trail of unfulfilled dreams." She laughs again. "Once you've said something, it's there on paper forever. Not that anyone pays attention more than I do, I'm sure."
Meantime, she has plenty of film projects on the go.
She stars in a film called Free Zone, which will be released in the spring, and she's just finished playing a double role in Goya's Ghosts, which also stars Javier Bardem and Stellan Skarsgard.
Portman then shoots Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium with Dustin Hoffman, here in Toronto.
"I've never shot in Toronto before, but I've been there a lot. My cousins used to live there, so we used to drive up every year. A 13-hour car ride," she murmurs, laughing. She says, "I'm just trying to do different things, because I feel like if I can keep myself interested, then there's hope of keeping it interesting."
On her own time, Portman says she mostly hangs out with family and friends. She is very involved in FINCA, a charity she encountered through Queen Rania of Jordan. "It does micro-financing, which is small loans for women with under $3 a day in developing nations. I've been to Uganda, Guatemala and Ecuador with them."
It's mostly about women and children, and, Portman says enthusiastically, the effect of the work done by FINCA is seen in one generation.
"The mother gets the loan and opens a business and then the daughter is going to university. It's an amazing part of a plan to eradicate poverty," she says, "which is, obviously, an idealistic hope."