The Leonardo DiCaprio movie Natalie Portman rejected: “It wasn’t appropriate”
Luck was in ten-year-old Natalie Portman’s favour when she attended a restaurant and ended up getting model scouted. With a love for the creative arts, she decided to use this new connection to bag an agent who could get her acting career started, and she subsequently landed her first film role in Leon: The Professional.
Sporting an iconic short black bob, the 13-year-old actor starred as Mathilda, a young girl who returns home to find that her whole family has been murdered by evil DEA agents who were laundering money with her father. She takes refuge inside the apartment of Leon, a lonesome hitman who lives next door. He trains her up to become a killer so that she can enact her revenge on her family’s killers.
Her performance was widely praised, allowing her to step into the spotlight and become one of Hollywood’s most promising new stars. At such a young age, however, she was subjected to many uncomfortable comments and fanmail, with many men sexualising the teenager after seeing her in Leon. While the film has been widely acclaimed, and it is certainly a thrilling, entertaining watch, there are strange sexual undertones present in the relationship between Portman’s character and Leon.
While there is nothing explicitly sexual in the final film, Mathilda clearly has a crush on Leon, trying to impress him in certain scenes, such as one where she dresses up as Marilyn Monroe in her white dress. The movie becomes more uncomfortable when you discover that the director, Luc Besson, started dating the 15-year-old Maïwenn Le Besco when he was 32, several years before, with her later claiming that Leon was inspired by their relationship. Additionally, before Portman and her parents agreed to the movie, they demanded that scenes involving nudity be removed from the script.
For Portman, the early years of her career were undeniably tainted by sexualisation, leaving her feeling greatly uncomfortable. Following her role in Leon, she was even offered the titular role in Lolita, in which a young girl is abused by a middle-aged man. She turned it down, uncomfortable with being typecast in sexualised roles at such a young age.
Luckily for Portman, there were some studio executives who took her young age into consideration. She was initially cast in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, a modernised interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic tale which retained the original dialogue. The role would require her to kiss and act romantically with DiCaprio, but Luhrmann and his crew soon realised that the age gap between them was too large and the dynamic would have been inappropriate.
Discussing the role, Portman revealed (via HelloGiggles), “It was a complicated situation and […] at the time I was 13 and Leonardo was 21.”
She added that it “wasn’t appropriate in the eyes of the film company or the director, Baz,” continuing, “It was kind of a mutual decision too that it just wasn’t going to be right at the time.”
Instead, Claire Danes was cast in the role of Juliet. Portman went on to perform in the Broadway show The Diary of Anne Frank before starting filming on Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, a role that shot her further into the mainstream.
