Natalie Portman names her most harshly treated movies: “I was very mistaken about that”
To be an actor, you need to be thick-skinned. Criticism is just part and parcel of the job, which requires you to shed all inhibitions and allow the most vulnerable aspects of yourself to be seen. Still, it’s only natural for a star to read a negative review and feel upset – despite the pedestal that we put celebrities on, they’re only human at the end of the day.
Acting is a gamble, and you never truly know what a critic is going to write. You could pour your all into a role, dedicating copious hours to researching and rehearsing your part, but it might still be met with a terrible review. It’s hard not to take offence, but in the film industry, there’s no time to dwell on negativity for too long. You simply move on to the next project, which will hopefully be better than the last.
Natalie Portman has had a pretty impressive career, spanning massive franchises like Star Wars, an Oscar-winning performance in Black Swan, and collaborations with iconic filmmakers like Terrence Malick, Mike Nichols, Tim Burton, and Wes Anderson. However, she has had to face critical backlash on numerous occasions when she has taken on roles in films that have divided critics.
In some cases, she has been left genuinely surprised by the reception to several of her films, expecting them to perform much better. Talking to Vogue, Portman said, “My first movie, [Léon] The Professional, got very bad reviews, and I was surprised by that.” The actor was just 12 when she played the leading role as Mathilda, a young girl taken under the wing of a quiet hitman following the murder of her family by corrupt DEA agents. Seeking revenge, she works with Léon to train as an assassin, and Portman’s performance is fantastic as she finds herself stuck between the adult world of violence and criminality and the child world of fear and vulnerability, desperate to find her place.
While the film received many good reviews, there were a handful of critics who had particularly negative things to say about the movie, including Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who both hated the film. The latter claimed that director Luc Besson “dabbles with a kiddie porn sensibility,” finding the depiction of Mathilda incredibly uncomfortable.
Almost 15 years later, Portman starred in the historical drama The Other Boleyn Girl, where she played Anne Boleyn, while Scarlett Johansson starred as her sister, Mary. The movie didn’t receive as much acclaim as Portman had hoped, with the actor revealing in the same interview that “I thought [it] was going to be more liked. And I was very mistaken about that.”
The film was largely criticised for its odd mixture of genre, with reviewers unsure on what the movie was trying to be. While Portman gave a great performance, the film just didn’t have the enduring power that the actor had hoped, and perhaps the story’s barrage of factual inaccuracies didn’t help.
There’s one other film that Portman was disappointed by the reaction to, and it’s perhaps one of the biggest bombs of her career. “Your Highness I thought would be more liked. Was very, very wrong,” she explained.
Released in 2011, the film, which was directed by David Gordon Green, was universally panned, with most critics finding it to be an incredibly immature display of embarrassing humour, blending stoner comedy and medieval fantasy to disastrous results. It lost $22 million at the box office, making it a massive failure on all fronts. That taught Portman never to stoop as low as frat boy comedies again.
