FIRE FIRE

cover | story | NATALIE PORTMAN
REBEL
YELL
Her teen years behind her, Natalie Portman is choosing riskier roles, like a revolutionary in the cautionary
Natalie Portman had barely hit puberty when she
appeared in her first movie, Luc Besson’s 1994 thriller
The Professional. She played a street-wise kid learning to be
a killer. It was a sexy role for a 12-year-old, and she caught some
flack for it. After that she seemed very cautious when choosing
roles. She turned down parts in Romeo + Juliet, Lolita and
The Ice Storm because she felt she was too young. She only
appeared in Anywhere But Here after a nude scene was cut, and
just a couple of years ago she shot a revealing strip scene for
Closer (a role which earned her an Oscar nomination) but then
urged director Mike Nichols not to use it. He agreed that it
wasn’t necessary and it was cut.
With pride, the 24-year-old Harvard graduate says she finally
feels like a woman in charge of her own future.
“I’m not scared, I’m brave, I think,” Portman jokes, wearing
a tight blue dress and sipping on a bottle of mineral water in a
hotel suite in Beverly Hills. Her hair, which was shaved for her
role in this month’s V for Vendetta, is still short, but thick. “I’m
not so reliant on other people’s opinions anymore. I feel like
I’ve gotten to a point in my life where everything that I do is
famous 34 | march 2006
With a
active rather than reactive. I’m not doing things to prove anything,
that I’m like or unlike what other people think of me.”
In V for Vendetta Portman plays a revolutionary/terrorist
living in a futuristic, fascist Great Britain. The thriller is
helmed by James McTeigue, who makes his directorial debut
after years as an assistant director, and the screenplay was
adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel by Andy and Larry
Wachowski, better known as The Wachowski Brothers. The
fraternal team wrote and directed the Matrix movies, on which
McTeigue also worked.
Shot in London and Berlin, the story takes place after
England loses a future World War III, and is now run by a tyrannical
government that uses terror and kidnappings to intimidate.
When Evey Hammond (Portman), a law-abiding woman, is
picked up and tortured by the secret police as an alleged
enemy of the state, V — a glorified freedom fighter to the
masses, but a masked terrorist to the government — rescues
Evey from imminent death. She, in turn, joins the ranks of V’s
ever-increasing group of insurgents determined to overthrow
their cruel and corrupt leaders.