The one character Natalie Portman relates to the most: “I always feel like I could do more”
From child star to teen idol to one of the most recognisable faces in cinema, Natalie Portman has been on quite the journey. Whether as Padmé Amidala from the Star Wars prequels, Jane Foster from the MCU, or in the myriad other great roles she’s had over the years, hers is a face everybody knows.
However, for all the fame and fortune those characters have brought her, only one has delivered the biggest prize in acting.
In 2010, Portman starred in Black Swan, director Darren Aronofsky’s dark tale of ambition and jealousy set in the world of ballet. She played Nina Sayers, a young, talented dancer with an extremely pushy mother intent on constant surveillance, played impeccably by Barbara Hershey, who is torn between achieving her dreams and battling her ever-diminishing mental health. For her much-praised performance as Sayers, Portman was showered with accolades, including the highly coveted Oscar for ‘Best Actress’.
It’s common knowledge that great actors can sometimes feel themselves becoming their own characters, especially if they’re striving to give as realistic a performance as possible. Worryingly for Portman, Sayers doesn’t exactly have the best life. Without spoiling the end of the movie (which is over 15 years old now, so really that’s on you), things don’t turn out so well for our aspiring ballerina. While the actor did find herself relating to Sayers somewhat, she was fortunately able to avoid her most self-destructive habits.
“I’m very demanding of myself, I would say, but I’m not self-punishing,” she told Indie London, highlighting a key difference between herself and her character. “I never feel like I’ve done enough… I always feel like I could do more. But I don’t like being hungry or in pain or tired. For this character, I went into that self-punishing mode and didn’t sleep and didn’t eat and worked out all day through injuries for three months, but sort of because I was living in that character. But on my own, I’m a pleasure seeker.”
This isn’t the only time the Annihilation star has discussed how difficult she found making Aronofsky’s film. Ballet is one of the most physically demanding disciplines in the world. It’s not something you can just walk into. Portman trained for over a year to get into character, routinely working for eight hours a day to learn choreography and mould her body into that of a dancer. Considering she would have been in her late 20s at the time, which is positively ancient in ballet terms, her achievements are seriously impressive.
Unfortunately, the entirety of Black Swan has several black marks to its name. The film was accused of ripping off the 1997 Satoshi Kon anime feature Perfect Blue, which follows a former member of a Japanese idol group’s psychological descent. Then there was the ‘dance double’ scandal. Ballerina Sarah Lane supposedly subbed in for Portman during key dance scenes, undermining most of the narrative around how hard she trained for the part. The subject is still a tense one to this day, with both sides offering very different versions of events.
Regardless of how much dancing she did or didn’t do, the actor still had to put herself in Sayers’ shoes (or flats) and put herself through an insane amount of psychological torment to play the damaged dancer. Thank the lord she didn’t go full method, otherwise things might have gone very, very differently.
