The ‘Star Wars’ backlash devastated Natalie Portman: “Everyone thought I was a horrible actress”
When Natalie Portman was a teenager and thrust into an unforgiving spotlight as she experienced her first significant professional backlash, it knocked her for six.
She was only 12 when she stepped into the spotlight as the sharp-tongued Mathilda in Léon: The Professional, a breakout role that had casting directors paying attention. Not long after, she popped up in Michael Mann’s Heat, Tim Burton’s wonderfully weird Mars Attacks!, and even belted it out in Woody Allen’s offbeat musical Everyone Says I Love You – each one adding weight to the quiet buzz that a new Hollywood name was on the rise.
A few years later, at 16, George Lucas picked her for one of the most sought-after roles in the industry, and it began a six-year odyssey that would fling her to the brink and back.
Portman was an unborn idea when the first two Star Wars hit the world in 1977 and 1980, hence her knowledge of the franchise’s significance was entirely second-hand. When she picked the mantle as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, she couldn’t have imagined that it would seriously affect her mental health and career if fans weren’t pleased.
Following the release, none was spared the vitriolic and existentially devastating mudslinging. Little Jake Lloyd, the eight-year-old Anakin Skywalker, was subject to insane amounts of abuse for his performance, which, admittedly, his mum shielded him from mostly. The hatred towards Ahmed Best’s Jar Jar Binks from both fans and mainstream media ruined his acting career and left him contemplating suicide. The Phantom Menace, and its sequels Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, were widely criticised as prime examples of Lucas’ inability to write human dialogue or coax good performances from his actors.
“Everyone thought I was a horrible actress,” Portman admitted to New York Magazine. However, this wasn’t just a criticism straying from fan quarters; it actually affected her ability to book jobs. “I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade,” she remembered, “And no director wanted to work with me.”
For Portman, her entire Star Wars experience began to feel like a poisoned chalice. Her profile was the biggest it had ever been, but it was through association with something people hated. “It was hard,” she confessed to Empire in 2019. “It was a bummer because it felt like people were so excited about new ones.”
In the end, she felt she was too young and inexperienced to not take the backlash personally, and she also didn’t yet know that angry nerds blasting you online is simply “the nature of the beast”, especially if you work on a populist franchise like Star Wars. In some ways, she also mused whether The Phantom Menace was doomed from the get-go because it was so feverishly anticipated that it could “almost only disappoint” upon release.
After Portman put Star Wars in her rearview mirror post-2005, though, something unexpected happened: the prequels seemed to go through a reassessment among fans. Suddenly, there were loud declarations of love for The Phantom Menace, and it was vindicating for an actor who had taken some pretty personal barbs at the time.
“With the perspective of time, it’s been re-evaluated by a lot of people who actually really love them now,” the Black Swan star smiled, “There’s a very avid group of people who think they’re the best ones now!” Then, with a wry smile, she quipped, “I don’t have enough perspective to weigh in.”
