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In these sacred pages just last week, we wrote about how Natalie Portman says that she refuses to play a sex object in her flicks. It’s beneath her.
Well, a girl can change her mind, can’t she?
The lovely Miss Portman, 29, who’s often portrayed in her movies as the girl next door, recently caught a great deal of buzz at the Venice Film Festival with her mucho caliente performance in the psychological thriller “Black Swan.” And reportedly Oscar voters are taking notice.
In the film, which was directed by Darren Aronofsky, Nat plays a highly driven ballerina named Nina and shares a steamy love scene with fellow ballerina Mila Kunis (gulp). Natalie says she “hyper-trained” for six months for the uber-physical role.
“[Aronofsky] talked to me about this scene in our first meeting eight years ago,” she told Reuters. “He described it as, `You’re going to have a sex scene with yourself.’ And I thought that was very interesting, because this movie is in so many ways an exploration of an artist’s ego and that narcissistic sort of attraction to yourself and also repulsion with yourself.”
Alas, in the long run Nina’s passion for performing causes her to become, well, mentally farshimmeled. “Six months ahead of the film, I went into sort of hyper-training where five hours a day I was doing both ballet and cross-training, with swimming,” she said. “A few months before was when we started getting into the choreography. It was very extreme.”
Already, reviews are glowing for the film, which also stars Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Portman “bravely ventured out of her comfort zone to play a character slowly losing sight of herself. It’s a bravura performance.”
The film will have a limited release in select American cities starting next December.