Natalie Portman has opened up about being subjected to a “long Lolita phase” when she was “really sexualised” as a child actor.
The Oscar-winning actor made her debut performance aged 13, starring in Luc Besson’s 1994 thriller Léon: The Professional as Mathilde, a young girl taken in by a hitman after the death of her family.
Speaking to Wednesday star Jenna Ortega forInterview magazine, Portman said that she was sexualised as a child, an experience she thinks is endemic for young girls on screen.
“I’ve talked about it a little before – about how, as a kid, I was really sexualized, which I think happens to a lot of young girls who are onscreen. I felt very scared by it,” she said.
She continued: “Obviously sexuality is a huge part of being a kid, but I wanted it to be inside of me, not directed towards me. And I felt like my way of protecting myself was to be like, ‘I’m so serious. I’m so studious. I’m smart, and that’s not the kind of girl you attack.”
In an attempt to get people to leave her alone, she created an image of herself as overly smart as a defence mechanism.
“It shouldn’t be a thing, but it worked,” she said.
“But I think that’s the disconnect between me being stupid and silly in real life, and people thinking that I’m some really serious bookish person. I’m not a particularly private person in real life – I’ll tell you anything – but in public, it was so clear early on that if you tell people how private you are, your privacy gets respected a lot more.”
She added: “I set up a little bit of a barrier to be like, ‘I’m not going to do photo shoots with my kids.'”
As a teenager, Portman starred in such films as Beautiful Girls (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), Anywhere But Here (1999) and Where the Heart Is (2000). She took a step back from acting from 1999 to 2003 to study psychology at Harvard University, but returned to stage in 2001 to appear in a Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.
She won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in the 2010 film Black Swan, a psychological horror film about the world of professional ballet.
Portman has previously spoken about her role in Leon, telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2023 that her relationship with the film was “complicated”.
“It’s a movie that’s still beloved, and people come up to me about it more than almost anything I’ve ever made, and it gave me my career,” she said, adding: “But it is definitely, when you watch it now, it definitely has some cringey, to say the least, aspects to it. So, yes, it’s complicated for me.”
In 2020, Portman said she built “fortresses” to protect herself from the media after being painted as a “Lolita figure”.
“Being sexualised as a child, I think, took away from my own sexuality because it made me afraid,” she said.
“It made me feel like the way I can be safe is to be like, ‘I’m conservative, and I’m serious, and you should respect me, and I’m smart and don’t look at me that way.’”
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