When it comes to really adopting the character of a personality for a movie, Natalie Portman is an expert. She's been acting since she was a little girl and has taken on a few of Hollywood's perfect roles, or even has the courage to leave roles if they no longer match her morals and ideals.
Before she was Padme in Star Wars, Jane Foster in Thor, and a ballerina in Black Swan, which earned her an Oscar, she was a smart academic studying psychology. Speaking of Black Swan, she used her psychology talents closely to get into that role.
But that's not all she did to get into character for one of the vital important roles in her occupation, and it almost took too much, each mentally and bodily. Here's what Portman went through to get to that Oscar.
Portman's Transformation Was Dangerous
The distinction between Portman and her persona Nina Sayers was once every now and then dim, particularly when Portman was once practising to turn into the ballet dancer. Portman was necessarily enjoying an artist who was harassed into having unrealistic expectancies of herself as she attempted to be highest at the same time as Portman herself had unrealistic expectancies put on her to become the character.
During her arrangements for turning into Nina, Portman misplaced 20 kilos, which even wound up frightening her director, Darren Aronofsky.
"At a certain point, I looked at [Natalie's] back, and she was so skinny and so cut," Aronofsky instructed Access Hollywood. "I was like, 'Natalie, start eating.' I made sure she had a bunch of food in her trailer."
Portman used to be put in a year-long rigorous training routine for the film and took even more extreme ballet and cross-training categories.
"I think it was just the physicality of it all that was the most extreme," Portman informed Us Magazine. "I mean, I had never gotten that much training -- to be doing five-to-eight hours a day of [it] was really a challenge.
"It's always a kind of things the place, whilst you put in so much, you get out so much."
"A lot of it I was doing with a double," she told Vanity Fair. "It used to be great but also physically exhausting, with all this damaged pretend glass and combating and jujitsu—it used to be kind of insane. That used to be the one time I were given injured. I imply, I were given ballet injuries, but that was the day I were given a non-ballet injury, I hit my head and had to get an M.R.I. Nothing came about, in fact."
Portman had been taking dance classes for years before she became an actress but she'd never done any that kind of training before. Portman found out what it was really like being a ballerina and came to appreciate all that they do.
"You do not drink, you do not go out with your mates, you wouldn't have much food, and you might be constantly putting your frame through excessive pain," she told She Knows.
But while Portman was living out her childhood dream and working with her good friend, Mila Kunis, there were other roadblocks in the way. Aronofsky had a particularly manipulative method to get his stars to act as realistic as possible.
Portman's Nina is infamously jealous of Kunis' character, Lily, and to get them to be really convincingly competitive, the director would pit them against each other in real life. He would say that one was working harder on their choreography, and tried to spark that competitive nature that's seen in the film.
Fortunately, it didn't work. But that doesn't mean that Aronofsky didn't use other techniques on his lead actress, including encouraging her to come out of her comfort zone.
"Darren discovered sooner or later that when making an attempt everything he sought after to do, if at the ultimate take he stated, 'Do this one for yourself,' that is the one that can be my absolute best," Portman told The Los Angeles Times.
Besides all of the training and mind games, she was getting in real-life, the part of the role that was a piece of cake for Portman was understanding Nina's mental illness. The actress studied psychology at Harvard so she was really familiar with what Nina goes through.
For Portman though, playing Nina was "undoubtedly probably the most challenging and the most rewarding."
After Her Oscar-Worthy Performance
When Portman earned her Oscar nomination for the film, the controversy started. Her dance double, Sarah Lane, came forward to say that the filmmakers told her to lie about how much dancing Portman did, so as to make it look like Portman did a lot to become an excellent ballet dancer.
"They were trying to create this symbol, this facade, in reality, that Natalie had achieved something bizarre," Lane said. "Something that is just about not possible ... to turn into a professional ballerina in a yr and a part. Even with as arduous as she labored, it takes so a lot more. It takes twenty-two years, it takes thirty years to turn out to be a ballerina."
Then there was a battle over how many scenes Portman actually did, but even the editor couldn't tell which was who because Portman's performance was spot on.
To all of the controversy, Portman said, "I had an opportunity to make something gorgeous with this movie, and I do not wish to give in to the gossip." Spoken like a true professional. But Portman knows all about professionals too.
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