Interview

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).

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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.)

But all of that is just information—valuable information, but information nonetheless. What we’re after is substance, some kind of material truth. There’s a common grumbling that we know too much about celebrities today, that the flow of data and images and the strange cult of online personality in the early 21st century has manifested a damaging transparency in the famous-people business—that celebrities aren’t what they used to be, that they wear flip-flops and buy groceries and post strange messages on the Internet, that they’re just like us, and who wants that? But maybe the real problem is that we think we know more about celebrities today than people did in less media-saturated eras, when in actuality we really don’t know much about them at all. How else can one explain the fact that Natalie Portman, now 28, famous for more than half of her life, easy to spot and accessible to know, remains a veritable enigma to us? We’ve been able to fly to the moon for nearly 40 years (see this month’s Society page), but one of the best-known actresses in the world, we can’t seem to crack in any real way.

To that end, we asked Jake Gyllenhaal, Portman’s co-star this fall in the Jim Sheridan war drama Brothers (and a veritable riddle himself—he supports the ACLU and likes to run, but what else?), to find out something about her that we don’t already know, to secure for us a portrait of her that touches upon certain intangibles. After much deliberation, Gyllenhaal decided that he was up to the task. The two actors spoke recently in Los Angeles.

JAKE GYLLENHAAL: I thought I would start off our interview with a little section that I’d like to call The Icebreaker. Are you sitting down?

NATALIE PORTMAN: No. Why? Should I be?