In a storied and quite diverse career, actor Natalie Portman has taken a grand jeté from roles like Nina Sayers in and the regal, Empire-challenging Queen Amidala in the franchise, to a more elegant iteration of the hammer-wielding Thor in the Marvel movies. Trying to assign a box-office value to her body of work got us to $8 billion with the big-ticket stuff, and not enough time to tally up the rest. She’s not a woman of a million faces, yet the 43-year-old finds the girl in the mirror as challenging as she is compelling.
“I like to think I have quite a strict boundary between who I play and who I am, and that work is an opportunity for me to act out behaviours that are very different from my life,” Portman says. “Because why do anything that I could actually just do in real life? “I always wanted to be an astronaut or a rock star or a woman who’s really ruthlessly ambitious, things I don’t identify with, where you get the opportunity to dip your toe in another life and live another life for a moment.” The elaborate make-up and costumes worn by Queen Amidala created a reflection in the mirror quite different to the one Portman usually sees.
But a role such as Maddie Schwartz in the new Apple TV+ series, creates a reflection that maintains its familiarity. “Inevitably you bring yourself and your soul to that, and there’s some kind of connection that draws you through it that you have to also incorporate,” Portman says. “That’s why you have to be ca.