Staying Power
With
Natalie Portman
From child assassin to Black Swan and Jackie Kennedy, NATALIE PORTMAN has enjoyed a notably multifarious 32-year career. Here, the Oscar-winning actor – and honorary Parisian – talks to MONICA AINLEY about her latest role in Guy Ritchie’s new movie, Fountain of Youth, growing up in the spotlight and embracing imperfection
Natalie Portman might be one of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars but, seated in a small café on Paris’s Left Bank, swathed in a pink cashmere turtleneck, it is clear that she is most content in the city that she and her children now call home. “Even when it’s cold and gray, there’s always some incredible exhibit or concert or dinner party or writers in town; something fascinating and stimulating happening… and the frequent vacations are so clutch!” she enthuses – her choice of slang revealing a 1990s childhood growing up in Long Island, New York.
Like me, a fellow transplant to the French capital, Portman doesn’t buy into the typecasting of Parisians as rude. “I find the people here are actually incredibly friendly – you just have to know how to interact, so that we’re not the ones being rude. Now, when I go back to the US, I’m like, oh, I would go into a store and not say hello to everyone there? It’s weird.”
“I think we have an ASSUMPTION that western cultures are all the same – and kind of EVENED out by all this pop CULTURE that everyone consumes. It’s not true”
She’s grateful to be raising her two children – Aleph (13) and Amalia (8) – in Paris and is particularly admiring of the French attitude to child-rearing. “All the kids that come to my house are, like, ‘bonjour Madame’ – and give me the bise [cheek-to-cheek kiss]. And before they leave, they are, like, ‘thank you for having me’ – and if I’m not nearby, they’ll come and find me to say it.” Cultural difference, she explains, does not equal rudeness. “I think we have an assumption that western cultures are all the same – and kind of evened out by all this pop culture that everyone consumes. It’s not true: it’s extremely specific here; and the culture is very different in both deep and surface ways.”
An Oscar-, Bafta- and two-time-Golden Globe-winning actor (who is also a Harvard psychology graduate and speaks three languages), Portman has been acting for 32 of her 43 years, with roles ranging from an intergalactic queen to America’s most famous First Lady. Her latest part is in Guy Ritchie’s heist adventure Fountain of Youth, playing Charlotte Purdue, the intellectual sibling to a loveable art thief (played by John Krasinski). The shoot was a joy, she says, marrying a “fun script that has everything you need: Adventure! Humor! Mysteries!” with incredible locations that included Bangkok, Vienna and Cairo.
“Listen, I had a really lucky trajectory. I do FEEL like working as a child was an AMAZING experience for me – and I was very LUCKY that I was not harmed”
“We got to shoot at the pyramids, which I’d always dreamed of visiting. Also, I fell in love with Vienna. I’m crazy about Viennese art and design, so to see all that Schiele and Klimt… There are, like, eight museums full of Viennese expressionism!” she tells me, her eyes widening in delight. One of them, the Austrian National Library, opened its doors to Ritchie and the cast for several high-stakes scenes. “We were really in the library.” Even for the fight scenes? “Yes, I was freaking out!”
The role was a gear shift from Portman’s recent projects, the darker May December (2023) and Lady in the Lake (2024), both of which were produced by MountainA, the company Portman co-founded in 2021 with her friend, the Paris-based author and producer Sophie Mas. In May December, Portman played Elizabeth Berry, an actor preparing for the role of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) in a film adaptation of Gracie’s life story. While filming was smooth sailing (“Julie and I had a beautiful, non-dramatic shoot; it’s so nice when your heroes live up to everything that you dream about them”), the story takes an unsettling look at both age-gap relationships and Berry’s craft in preparing to play Atherton-Yu, a woman infamous for her decades-long romance with Joe (Charles Melton), which began when he was 13 and she was 36.
Portman’s performance captured her character’s descent from curious actor into figure of manipulation (Barry immerses herself in her subject’s world, blurring the lines between observation and imitation, until she eventually seduces Joe), challenging the ethics of storytelling itself. The dilemmas of fiction aren’t unfamiliar to Portman, whose role as Mathilda in Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional in 1994, at the age of just 13, has sparked ongoing ethical debate. The film includes scenes where Mathilda flirts with an adult hitman (Jean Reno), with critics accusing Besson of inappropriately blurring boundaries between child and adult, sparking concerns around child-actor consent and the responsibility of directors.
“Listen, I had a really lucky trajectory. I do feel like working as a child was an amazing experience for me – and I was very lucky that I was not harmed,” Portman considers. “[But] so many kids are harmed. And there are aspects of being publicly known and publicly seen as a kid… that turn you into an adult in a certain way. You become a woman in people’s eyes when you’re on screen.”
“So much of being a WOMAN who’s trying to do it all is just being tired and overwhelmed and not having any TIME to yourself. So you have to demand it for yourself – and you have to GIVE it to yourself”
Given her three decades of experience in Hollywood, and having grown up in its spotlight, she is well placed to reflect on how it compares now. Does she feel much has changed, particularly since the Me Too movement began? “Yeah,” she pauses and sighs, “it’s changing but it’s a process… You know, things don’t change overnight, and there’s a backlash, there’s regression, all sorts of things. If anything, our current political moment shows us progress is not a straight line.” Apropos my personal favorite Portman role, I wonder aloud what Jackie Kennedy would have thought of the recent release of the JFK Assassination Records by the Trump administration. “Ha! Much ado about nothing. It’s just chaos. Throw lots of nonsense around and confuse everyone and no one knows where to look. It’s like paralysis by idiocy.”
Portman has found Paris an easier place to be in the public eye, she considers. “They’re very good at privacy here. I feel like the biggest compliment is ‘elle est très discrète’ [‘she is very discreet’].” This admiration for discretion no doubt prevents people from approaching her the way Rihanna did last year outside a fashion show, just as the news was filled with Portman finalizing her divorce from French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, to inform her that she is “one of the hottest bitches in Hollywood forever”. (I can attest, though, that the sentiment is very much shared by locals who are proud to have her on French soil.)
The Rihanna moment went viral on social media, and, as Portman later told Jimmy Fallon, was exactly what she needed to hear in the moment. Our conversation turns to how she finds the balance in her life, between career and motherhood, and she shares the two pieces of advice she lives by. “My cousin and I always say that Ali Wong quote back to each other: ‘I don’t wanna lean in, I wanna lie down!’” she laughs. “You gotta lie down, you gotta take away everything you don’t have to do and then do nice things for yourself. Whether that means taking a nap – like, literally – or whatever it is. So much of being a woman who’s trying to do it all is just being tired and overwhelmed and not having any time to yourself. So, you have to demand it for yourself – and you have to give it to yourself.”
Her second tip is to get friendly with imperfection. “If you’re too bent on being a perfect mom, being the perfect wife, being the perfect friend, perfect at your job, you’re going to crumble,” she says. “Like, the number one thing about being a successful, happy, doing-it-all woman is being pretty cool with… ‘I suck at everything’.” Duly encouraged by the sentiment, I bring up a list of punchy, unsourced quotes that are attributed to Portman on her IMDB page. Some make her laugh, others she has no recollection of. Did she say, “the moment you think you’re better than anyone else is the moment you need to be slapped in the face?” She pauses. “Well, I certainly don’t disagree with that.”
“When ANYONE asks what it’s LIKE getting older, I’m, like, it’s REALLY cool”
Portman is as silly and light-hearted as she is serious and brainy, as anyone who has seen expletive-laden Natalie’s Rap on Saturday Night Live will know. “I had an osteopath working on me recently, who told me his brother’s favorite film was Your Highness,” she laughs. “If you see it, brace yourself. It’s a stoner comedy set in medieval times.” She’s equally tickled to hear my husband is a No Strings Attached mega fan. “That. Is. Amazing. I mean that’s the joy and the lesson of a long career. It’ll be something you don’t think anyone has seen, then someone comes up to you and tells you it’s very important to them 15 years later.”
She’s undaunted by the passing of time. “When anyone asks what it’s like getting older, I’m, like, it’s really cool.” She attributes a lot of it to enduring friendship – the giving and receiving of care. “It’s the best thing about getting older, that you have friends for 20 or 30 years. You’ve shown up for each other, you trust them with your life – and you know how to make each other laugh, how to take care of each other when it’s hard”. She smiles contentedly. “It’s the greatest thing.”
Fountain of Youth will be available globally on Apple TV+ from May 23
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