
In an interview with interview magazine.
She’s grown up before our eyes, that Natalie Portman. A stone-cold 12-year-old in The Professional (1994). Making hay with Pacino in Heat (1995). Playing underage over-smart in Beautiful Girls (1996). Star Wars. Harvard. Garden State (2004). Closer (2004). A Golden Globe. A degree in psychology. V for Vendetta (2005), which afforded her the opportunity to be, for a fleeting moment, the hottest girl at Comic-Con, and inspired a band to call themselves Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head. Now, she’s directing (she helmed a segment of the new anthology film New York, I Love You), and producing (the family drama Hesher), and venturing into both comedy (David Gordon Green’s Your Highness), and Norse mythology (she just signed on to play the female lead in Thor).
Yet, for all we’ve witnessed, watching her blossom into adulthood, go off to college, fall in love with Darth Vader, and come back a strong, self-assured young woman, what do we really know about Natalie Portman? That she was born in Israel? That she’s a vegetarian? We know that when Portman was 11 years old, a scout from Revlon approached her at a local pizza joint on Long Island and asked if she would be interested in pursuing a career in modeling. (Portman declined.) We know that she’s one of the most famous people to have an Erdös-Bacon number, an academic-entertainment industry designation bestowed upon the rare few who’ve published papers in the field of mathematics and are connected to Kevin Bacon by less than six degrees. (Portman’s number is five.) We know that she devotes a considerable amount of time to various social and political causes, including FINCA, an organization that promotes microcredit lending in developing countries. (We’ll let her explain how that shakes down.) We also know that she has campaigned for several Democratic political candidates. (People in red states might have actually hung up on her in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, when she logged hours at the phone banks for the Obama campaign.)