'I was barely eating during Black Swan': Natalie Portman on the role that has made the Oscar hers to lose

By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 1:42 PM on 7th January 2011

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Breathtaking beauty: Natalie Portman as the tormented Nina in Black Swan

Natalie Portman is curled up on a sofa, sipping a glass of water and looking fuller in face and figure than she does in her astonishing new movie, Black Swan, where she plays a dancer who barely eats.
The actress is breathtaking in the picture, which is directed with melodramatic flourish by Darren Aronofsky. She will go all the way through the current awards season in a series of evening gowns designed to disguise her bump — because she’s pregnant by her ballet dancer fiance Benjamin Millepied, who did some of the ­choreography on Black Swan.
Trawling through past Oscar acceptance speeches on YouTube, it occurs to me that Meryl Streep was the only actress to pick up a statuette for Best Actress while expecting — and that was three decades ago for Sophie’s Choice. Natalie could be the next, because the Oscar is hers to lose.
She has worthy rivals in Annette Bening, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Williams, Lesley Manville and ­Jennifer Lawrence, but I believe Oscar voters will deem her the most outstanding for her performance as Nina Sayer, a tortured and obsessive ballet performer.
Black Swan originally started out as an All About Eve-ish story about rival actresses. But by the time Aronofsky first talked to Natalie about it, a full ten years ago, he’d shifted it to the ballet world. 
Some — mostly balletomanes — mistakenly think it’s about the ballet, but the dance is used as a metaphor. 
Natalie recalled an early script where her character was named Alexandra. ‘But she seems very much a Nina,’ Natalie said, explaining that in Hebrew, Nina means grace.
There’s also Chekhov’s Nina in The Seagull, and all the psychological and literary sensibility that association brings.

 

In the family way: Natalie Portman's baby bump was beginning to show today as she walks her dog in Los Angeles

 

Red carpet queen: Portman is resplendent at the film's New York premiere

In the film, Nina has been pulled out of the corps de ballet of a New York company to play the dual roles of Odette and Odile, the white swan and the black swan, in a new version of Swan Lake. Pushed and pulled by a domineering mother and a bullying director, Nina self-destructs into a state of psycho-sexual madness, and the duelling swan personalities pirouette her towards tragedy.
I love the movie. I’ve seen it four times but I’ve had (and rather enjoyed) some ferocious arguments with ­American friends who aren’t fans.

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Even Natalie and her director have had differences of opinion about what’s real and what’s not in the film. That’s part of the fun. Creating the performance of her career took its toll on the 29-year-old actress. ‘It was more difficult than anything I’ve ever experienced before. I like to go home and be myself but with this one I didn’t get the chance. It didn’t leave me.
‘I was barely eating, I was working 16 hours a day. I was almost method acting without intending to. I do wonder now how people can do this kind of role when they have a family.’

 

Fractured mind: Natalie Portman in the Oscar-tipped Black Swan

Did she ever feel she was going bonkers, like Nina? She laughed and told me she never  felt she was losing it — she just felt exhausted.
I asked Aronofsky if he had to push his leading lady into giving a classic performance, but he insisted that it was always in her. ‘It just took the right role — I had nothing to do with it,’ he told me.
Natalie started ballet lessons at age four, stopped at 12 and resumed at 27. ‘It was like starting from scratch. I had co-ordination and could feel the music pretty easily but I had to re-learn the physical movements. 
‘I love letting my hair down and dancing to rock and disco. Sometimes I so feel like doing what Meryl Streep did in Mamma Mia! — that kind of film musical,’ she told me, adding that she doesn’t want all her films to be serious ‘prestige’ films. 
So much so that her next two are comedies. No Strings Attached has Ashton Kutcher as her leading man (she also executive-produced it) and another, Your Highness, was shot in Northern Ireland with 127 Hours star James Franco. 
Natalie also produced Hesher, about an anarchic loner played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt which I caught at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. It didn’t seem the kind of film she’d get her hands dirty on. But she said she has never wanted to ‘fit into some mould of respectability and do the right kind of film’.
In fact, the movies I’ve liked most of hers have been a little dangerous: Garden State, the Hotel Chevalier short she did for Wes Anderson, Heat, and Luc Besson’s The Professional.
And let’s add Black Swan to Natalie’s brilliantly dangerous list.