Natalie Portman is making the rounds promoting her superpowered new role in “Thor: Love and Thunder”, and opened up about returning to the “Thor” franchise in an interview with the The Sunday Times.
“For someone to say, ‘Let’s see how much strength you can have,’ is a completely different psychological space to inhabit,” she says of preparing to play the new iteration of Jane Foster as the Goddess of Thunder.
“I turned 40 while making the movie and it was an incredible point in my life to say, ‘You’re going to be the fittest, strongest version of yourself,'” she added.
During the interview, Portman also opened up about the way the media discussed her when she was just 13, starring in the action thriller “Léon: The Professional”.
“I think, in that time, it was very normal,” she said of some of the things written about her in relation to the 1994 film.
“Some of it was the types of roles that were being written and some of it was the way journalists felt entitled to write about it,” she continued, offering one specific example.
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“I remember reading a review of myself when I was about 13 that mentioned my breast buds,” she recalled, explaining that her response was to “put on all these defences,” which included turning down scripts any love scenes.
“It was like, I’m not going to be seen that way, because it felt like a vulnerable position and also a less respectable position, in some way, to be characterized like that,” she said.