The scene Natalie Portman apologised for shooting: “We shouldn’t have done it”
In many ways, the good-looking, talented, and charming Natalie Portman encompasses everything idyllic about Hollywood and the good old US of A, serving as the epitome of an all-American girl.
However, this is all very ironic, because she isn’t American at all, not by birth anyway, where her mother was from the state of Ohio, but her father originally came from Israel, which is where she was born in 1981.
Natalie Herschlag lived in Jerusalem for the first three years of her life before she and her family emigrated to the United States, changing her name when she joined the cast of Léon: The Professional, opting for her grandmother’s maiden name of Portman as her new nom de plume.
Since then, her Israeli and Jewish heritage rarely comes up in her work, with one notable exception being the 2005 film Free Zone, directed by Amos Gitai, the title of which comes from an area where the borders of many Middle Eastern countries meet, and people of all nationalities conduct free trade and enterprise.
The movie stars Portman as Rebecca, an American woman living in Jerusalem after the breakdown of her relationship with an Israeli man, not shying away from the geo-political situation in the region, nor the horrendous treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government. So, of course, when you’re dealing with this sort of subject matter, controversy is never far away.
Portman was forced to defend herself and the production after filming a kissing scene near Jerusalem’s Western Wall. “I really don’t want to offend anyone’s beliefs or impose anything on anyone, and it was mistaken to do it,” she told Access Hollywood, adding, “As soon as it offended people, we moved. We had a very hectic work schedule, so we weren’t thinking. We shouldn’t have done it.”
The Western Wall goes by many different names, such as the Wailing Wall, the Buraq Wall, or the Kotel, is thousands of years old, and considered one of the holiest sites in the entire city, as it forms part of an ancient Jewish temple. The Wall is governed by strict religious rules, with men and women usually kept apart in accordance with Orthodox practices, which led to Portman and her co-star Aki Avni to leave by a group of Orthodox Jews praying there, and the kissing scene being not included in the final cut of the film.
Given how famous the Western Wall is and Portman’s ties with the country and its faith, she should have expected something like this to happen, but this also wouldn’t be the last time she made a movie in Israel, though. In 2015, she released her directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness, covering the final days of the Palestine Mandate and the birth of Israel as an independent country, for which she received criticism at the time, as the project was partly funded by the Israeli government.
As the modern debate over Hollywood and its ties with Israel rages on in the face of the relentless genocide, it’s important to remember that there have always been pitfalls associated with filming in the country. Portman’s links to Israel have always been one of her most criticised features, but they actual came back to bite her this time around.
