The Academy Award winning actress talks about working with Time’s Up and MeToo movements, why she didn’t go to Israel and her upcoming projects.
Academy Award winning actress, Natalie Portman, has been working in Hollywood “nearly all her life” and yet the coveted Oscar came her way in 2011 with Black Swan. The actress who has led a private life came under scrutiny last year when she refused to go to Israel for one thing.
She’s also dedicated herself to Time’s Up and MeToo movements even though she has no MeToo story to tell. “I’ve been working for 25 years—I’ve never had friendships in my industry until now,” she tells Vanity Fair. “You’re usually the [only] girl in the movie. It’s made us come together. We’re actively gathering. Just the power of us getting to know other women in our own industry and sharing information that can help us be safer, more productive, more successful.”
Reese Witherspoon, who is producing Natalie’s upcoming film Pale Blue Dot said about the actress to VF: “Natalie is full of incredible ideas. She’ll text me and a couple of the other girls, ‘I have a crazy idea!’ And they’re always great. And then I’ll say, ‘Hold up, how are we going to pay for this?’ And somebody else is ‘How are we going to execute this?’ We all have our different proficiencies. It is sort of a SWAT team. She is our instigator. Our catalyst.”
As for Israel, the actress caused uproar when she declined to accept the 2018 Genesis Prize. But her reasons are more than fair. As she tells the magazine: “I’d like to clarify I have no issue traveling to the country. They may have issues with it now, but I don’t. I was choosing not to attend an event where I was supposed to be onstage with Prime Minister Netanyahu, sitting next to him, which felt like an endorsement. So there is a distinction.”
In addition to her work with the movements, the 30-year-old actress is far from done. Her next film is Xavier Dolan’s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, in which she is joined by Jacob Tremblay and Kit Harrington as cast members. Reese Witherspoon-produced Pale Blue Dot, in which Natalie is starring alongside Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, and Dan Stevens, comes next. Shooting for the film began in July. In addition to these projects, Natalie hopes to “direct and star in a biopic about the dueling identical-twin sisters who wrote advice columns as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren.”
-With information from Vanity Fair’
