Natalie Portman successfully navigated her way from child star to Oscar-winner, but says her fears after the “sexualized” reaction to her earliest film roles caused her to build “fortresses” that initially limited her career.
Appearing on the podcast “Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard,” the 39-year-old Hollywood heavyweight said public response to her turns in “Léon: The Professional” and “Beautiful Girls” were a lot for a 12-year-old child and young teen to handle.
“I was definitely aware of the fact that like, I was being portrayed — like mainly in the kind of journalism around when the movies would come out — as this Lolita figure and stuff,” she said.
“Being sexualized as a child, I think, took away from my own sexuality because it made me afraid,” Portman told Shepard, a fellow actor.
“It made me feel like the way I could be safe was to be like, ‘I’m conservative, and I’m, you know, serious, and you should respect me, and I’m smart and like, don’t look at me that way,’ ” she said.
“But at that age, you do have your own sexuality, and you do have your own desire, and you do want to explore things, and you do want to be open. But you don’t feel safe, necessarily, when there’s, like, older men that are interested, and you’re like, ‘No, no, no, no,’ ” she explained.
So she built “fortresses” that “didn’t allow the full expression of who I was at that time,” she said.
“I would start choosing parts that were less sexy because it made me worried about the way I was perceived and how safe I felt,” she said.
“So many people, I think, had this impression of me that I was, like, superserious, and like prude and conservative,” she said. “I realize I consciously cultivated that because it was a way to make me feel safe. That, ‘Oh, if someone respects you, they’re not going to objectify you.’ “
She said such an approach “hinders” natural development because “you’re creating a self defensively” to “be immune to any weirdness.”
In the end, “it worked out, luckily,” she said. “I mean, I was safe.”
Shepard said Portman appeared to be the “opposite” of Disney stars who start out in such innocent roles in the public eye and then later go to the opposite extreme trying to claim their sexuality.
“It’s totally true, and it’s so weird because it’s, like, I was auditioning for all that stuff, too, and I like never got it as a kid. I always got like the dark, kind of sexy, young girl,” Portman laughed.
She recalled going to auditions for commercial products like cereal, “and they’d be like, ‘No way.’ I was just not cute and chipper.”
Portman recently published the children’s book, “Natalie Portman’s Fables,” a retelling of classic fables from a more modern point of view.
“I wanted to create characters that are representative of the world — that you just want to get into their minds and hearts and empathize with them,” she said.
