Natalie Portman’s complicated relationship with ‘Leon’: “It definitely has some cringe”
Over the last 30 years, Natalie Portman has starred in a selection of cinema fans’ favourite movies, including the Star Wars movies, V for Vendetta, Jackie and, of course, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, for which she won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’. But it all started for Portman back in 1994 with Leon: The Professional.
Leon is Luc Besson’s action-thriller, starring Jean Reno, Gary Oldman and Portman in her first film role. The plot tells of a professional hitman who takes a 12-year-old girl under his wing after her family is killed by a DEA agent. The two develop a peculiar relationship, and she eventually becomes his protégé, learning how to become a hitman.
However, Portman herself can’t help but feel “conflicted” over her opinions on her breakout role. During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actor once said, “It’s a movie that’s still beloved, and people come up to me about it more than almost anything I’ve ever made.”
Portman continued: “And it gave me my career, but it is definitely when you watch it now, it definitely has some cringe, to say the least, aspects to it. So, yes, it’s complicated for me”. Perhaps Portman is looking back on her early career in the same way many look back at their high school photos and cringe at what they see.
The actor had previously expressed the fact that she felt sexualised during Leon, an experience that made her feel “unsafe”. Still barely a teenager, Portman had received “fan mail” from someone who described a “rape fantasy” involving the young Portman.
Detailing the other instances Portman faced as a result of Leon, Portman said, “I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written to me. A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews.”
“I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort,” Portman had said during the Women’s March in Los Angeles.
Evidently, Leon set Portman on the road to stardom, but her experience of being thrown into the limelight and subsequently sexualised despite her young years left the actor feeling unsafe and a bit cringed out by the whole affair. We must also throw into account that director Luc Besson also has an incredibly questionable history in terms of sexualising young girls, which likely did not make Portman feel any more comfortable.
