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Natalie Portman has pulled back the curtain on the intense reality of growing up under Hollywood’s spotlight and how she built armor to survive it.
The 43-year-old was already navigating a world where youth and innocence were paradoxically entangled with adult perceptions of sexuality when she first stepped onto a film set at just 12, starring in the R-rated Léon: The Professional. And as she reflects now, decades later and with an Oscar to her name, it wasn’t just acting she had to learn, it was self-preservation.
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In a recent conversation with Jenna Ortega for Interview magazine, Portman explored that early tension.
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“I think there’s a public understanding of me that’s different from who I am. I’ve talked about it a little before — about how, as a kid, I was really sexualized, which I think happens to a lot of young girls who are onscreen,” said Portman. “I felt very scared by it. Obviously sexuality is a huge part of being a kid, but I wanted it to be inside of me, not directed towards me.”
Portman, who stars opposite Ortega, 22, in the upcoming movie The Gallerist, said her “way of protecting myself” at the time was to portray herself as “so serious. I’m so studious. I’m smart, and that’s not the kind of girl you attack.”
That cultivated image of the “smart” girl wasn’t just for show. It was a deliberate defense, one that, heartbreakingly, worked. “I was like, if I create this image of myself, I’ll be left alone,” she said. “It shouldn’t be a thing, but it worked.”
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Ortega, who’s grown up in the industry herself, expressed how instantly recognizable that struggle feels to young actors.
“As soon as someone mentions that they were a young actor, you start to look at them differently,” she said. ‘There’s something really, really heartwarming but also simultaneously devastating anytime I speak to actresses from previous generations, just because their experience is so jarringly different.”
She added, “It’s nice to see how much it’s changed because I’ve been very fortunate in my upbringing, in our line of work.”
For Portman, the roles she was offered mirrored the industry’s narrow views. There was the phase where she was typecast into “Lolita”-esque roles, followed by years of playing the woman who helps a man find “his emotional thing.”
The actress previously told People Magazine, “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.”
“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 worth of safety and respect,” she said at the time.
Even today, at 43 and with a career that spans decades, Portman seems to carry that quiet fierceness, the same one she used as a kid to carve out space for herself.
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