VOGUE

Some actresses get mired in prettiness and never reach the dark place where the great work hides. Natalie Portman is the opposite. At 29, she is in the process of smashing through the aura of perfection she carries—Queen Amidala from Star Wars, hugely gifted beauty with a Harvard degree, and vegan to boot. Drama is dangerous, heroines are carnivores, and talent demands burnt offerings. As Nina in Darren Aronofsky’s gory ballet tale Black Swan, she transforms herself from timid ingenue to powerful maenad. The film is set in a ballet company where dancers vie for the attention of a coldly knowing choreographer; when he casts the virginal, anorexic Nina to star as Odette/Odile, the white swan and the black swan in Swan Lake, she must literally break through her body and lose her mind to be reborn as an artist. Portman’s performance is a tour de force that takes the audience inside Nina, keeps you with her as she transgresses taboos, and makes you participate, for a few thrilling moments when Nina becomes the swan, in the kind of transcendent self-loss that only artists know.

It’s no accident that Nina means “little girl” in Spanish; Portman was first seen, in The Professional, as a twelve-year-old child. Black Swan is a lurid but effective parable about growing up, a stylized horror tale full of mirrors and blood that owes large debts to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. But its premise allows Portman to give a superb, extreme performance that replaces the child with an awe-inspiring woman. On a symbolic level, it’s the story of her life. The Oscar nomination will be secondary to that.

Nina is an obedient workaholic who lives in a pink-and-white universe ruled by ballet and her mother, and tortures herself in every way, from too much practice to regular vomiting. Her one goal is to be perfect.

“The only way to be perfect,” says Aronofsky, “is to allow chaos and madness into your life. Natalie has very few opportunities to express the dangerous side of her, and there’s a lot of colors there. She teases; she’s playful and sexy and so beautiful it hurts.”

Click here for a behind-the-scenes video of Natalie Portman's cover shoot.

She also dances remarkably well. With posture as straight as if she never hunched to text, she sits on a banquette at the Café Sabarsky and recalls years of ballet as a child on Long Island—“Two hours a day after school, five hours on Saturdays. When I started acting, I knew I’d have to downgrade to twice a week and would no longer be in the best class, so I stopped. The dance training for Black Swan started a year before the film, with two hours a day. Six months later we ramped it up to five hours a day, and the last two months it was eight hours a day, because we added choreography and cross training, so I was also swimming a mile a day. The discipline was good for the part—it hurt a lot; your body is in constant pain.” Like most dancers, she survived on coffee and ibuprofen, and slept five hours a night.

A vegetarian at home and a vegan when out, she orders a thoroughly eccentric meal: field greens followed by a soft pretzel with mustard, and an elderflower spritzer.

“Is that it?” I ask.

"I swear, I eat. I ate a bagel an hour ago. I consume my own weight in hummus every day. I cook a lot, and I even do vegan baking.

“I like pleasure, I like joy. I’d never get to the point where I would starve or injure myself like Nina does. I’m the opposite—when I’m hungry, I eat, and I always make sure I’m eating something delicious. I’m tough on myself in terms of the standards I want to live up to, but that’s also part of my pleasure: knowing you are being your fullest self. Being your fullest self is a lot of work.”

Portman is given to extremes: “It’s almost more important for me to be going at something full force than what the specific thing actually is.”

When Darren Aronofsky first met her to discuss Black Swan—at Howard Johnson’s in Times Square, of all places—it was ten years ago, Portman was a junior in college, and there was no script. “He explained it was about an artist who has a double and battles with her own ego, and said, ‘You will have a sex scene with yourself.’ ”

She has two: the first when Nina follows her choreographer’s orders to pleasure herself, and the second with a rival dancer, played by Mila Kunis. The scene is jolting. “Lesbian scenes, sex scenes, they’re all over the place!” says Portman. “But because it’s me, people are shocked. I see the value of a good-girl persona—it’s so easy to subvert it!”

She’s been subverting it for years. There was the stripper Alice in Mike Nichols’s Closer in 2004; there was her tough, charming Sam in Garden State (“Zach Braff whispered, ‘Harold and Maude’—so I played her as Ruth Gordon”). She did an uproariously badass rap video on Saturday Night Live in 2006, all fists and “suck” and “fuck.” “I think everyone was relieved I could be uncareful,” she says. Her next film, out this month, is a comedy with Ashton Kutcher about a woman doctor who wants sex but not love. It’s just been titled No Strings Attached, after being known as Fuck Buddies. She’s proud of what she does in Your Highness, a sword-and-sorcery slacker epic due in April. Its director, David Gordon Green, explains, “She’s this warrior princess who’s dirtier and more foulmouthed and more violent than everybody else. People get energized when they see what she’s doing. She’s hilarious.”

She’s on a flying visit from Los Angeles, where she now lives. “I’d always been really wary of L.A.; then I realized I liked it. But everyone important to me for my entire life is in New York,” she says—her parents, her best friend, Jeanine Lobell, and her boyfriend, Benjamin.

Millepied, the New York City Ballet dancer and choreographer whom she met during the shooting of Black Swan.
An only child, she has, she says, “fake siblings—I always imagine that’s why I have so many friends. In New York, I have probably 50 people that I’m very close to—so there’s constant interaction, but I don’t really see anyone regularly because it’s 50 people, whereas in Los Angeles I have five friends, and I see them every day. It’s the first time I’ve had really close girlfriends. Kate and Laura Mulleavy have schedules that are similar to mine, so we can go for a hike at noon, or to the museum in the middle of the day.” Kate and Laura’s inspiration for the Rodarte tutus in the movie was the Degas bronze statue of the little dancer with the torn tulle skirt at the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena.

Portman has started her own production company with a partner, Annette Savitch. Handsomecharlie Films is named after both Chaplin and a—departed—dog of hers. They’ve already produced a comedy called Hesher, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and are developing a girl pot comedy called Best Buds.

“We’re very into female comedies; there just aren’t enough. We’re trying to go for that guy-movie tone, like Judd Apatow’s movies, or The Hangover but with women—who are generally not allowed to be beautiful and funny, and certainly not vulgar.”

Portman is in favor of vulgar. “There’s a difference between being in a bra and underpants as an object on a men’s-magazine cover and playing yourself—a woman with desires and needs who loves and laughs with her friends—in a bra and underpants. You become an object if you simply put it out there. Most movies are made by men, it’s totally natural that they’re going to present their worldview, so we’re trying to find more women who are writers and directors who are expressing their worldview. Did you see Tiny Furniture? Lena Dunham wrote, directed, and starred in it; she’s 23, and it is just amazing. She walks around in her underwear for the whole movie; it’s harsh. She’s the subject, she’s not the object, and it’s beautiful—that’s the kind of thing we need more of.”

Handsomecharlie also produced Portman’s own short, Eve, which she modestly calls a “dinky film.” She directed the legends Lauren Bacall as a vain widow and Ben Gazzara as a fragile recent widower, with Olivia Thirlby as Bacall’s granddaughter. Eve captures the stultifying daze of an evening in a restaurant with older family, and the frustration of trying to broach a matter—to do with Eve, the unseen mother—without ever getting an answer. It’s a subtly masterful little film, and Bacall is superb, gallant, all heartbreaking facade.

“I think I was kind of playing Natalie,” says Olivia Thirlby.

“The biggest challenge for all actors,” says Portman, “is that you see yourself on a screen outside of your body and have to reenter your body to look at the world through your own eyes instead of at yourself. . . .

“I try not to read reviews or anything about me. It’s totally natural to be interested, but it’s completely damaging. Over the almost 20 years I’ve been working, I’ve been up, I’ve been down, I’ve been in, I’ve been out. Just getting to do the work is the privilege. I always feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. The one thing you have control over is having a great experience by doing your work fully.”

“She’s a lesson in what you put first,” says Mike Nichols, whom she considers a mentor. “She can’t stand to see herself in a movie, and she never puts movies ahead of life. She cares about her friends, what’s going on in her head, and how things work.”

For the last seven years, she’s been Ambassador for Hope for the micro-finance organization Finca (Foundation for International Community Assistance). She went down to Washington to hit up Richard Holbrooke for substantial funds for Finca’s Afghanistan program, reconnoiter the State Department, the White House, the National Security Council, and to discuss Finca’s Haiti program with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—before the earthquake happened. Soledad Gompf, the head of development for Finca, went with her, as did Finca’s strategic planner Betsy Ross, who notes that “she was wearing a Rodarte sweater and a little black dress and flats, looking like ‘This is going to be so much fun!’—and she took Washington by storm.”

Portman’s most wobbly moment was at Harvard: “I gained my freshman fifteen or 20 and had superdepressed moments. That Cambridge winter is tough. It was important to know how to go through that and how to get myself out of it. You start learning how to ask your friends or professionals for help, or go to mentors.”

At Harvard she confided in Jorie Graham, the Boylston professor of poetry. “She was the kind of woman I wanted to be—sexy and smart. It’s an amazing gift to get to hear someone talk in that way about poetry. Yeats, Eliot—the rhythms of the words stay in your body all day.”

Graham notes that Natalie went under her real name, Hershlag, and “the class soon forgot what she was and got to know who she was. She was determined not to let her life run on fame, and not to lose perspective on what life’s journey is for. . . . She was wise enough not to trust the virtual over the actual.”

Her other mentor, besides Nichols, is Jeanine Lobell, the wife of the actor Anthony Edwards, mother of four children, and founder of Stila cosmetics. When Lobell sold Stila and took her family around the world for a year, Portman joined them for five weeks in China.

“Natalie gets more and more beautiful because she’s a good person,” says Lobell, who’s seen a few faces. “When people get older and they’re not good on the inside, it starts to show. That last scene of Black Swan—all the emotion is in every movement of her face. That’s testimony that actresses should go easy on the Botox. Everyone gets the face they deserve.”

Click here for a slideshow of Natalie Portman throughout the years in Vogue.