“The reason that people attack you is that they LAMINATE onto you,” [the showrunner] repeated again and again. “You scare them, so THEY ARE LAMINATING.” I wasn’t sure what she meant—projection? Transference? But all I could picture was an image of myself, cut out like a paper doll and flattened, encased on both sides in shiny plastic, hanging from a lanyard at a conference.
It’s an imperfect analogy. But just as Dunham inadvertently evokes strong, sometimes delusional emotions in both her peers and the public, so does Portman. (Incidentally, Portman is starring in Dunham’s upcoming Netflix comedy, Good Sex; Dunham thanks Portman in Famesick’s acknowledgments.)
Many of the people experiencing those emotions are men. See, for instance, the Star Wars fans who have idolized Portman since The Phantom Menace; Zach Braff, who wrote the ultimate manic-pixie-dream-girl role in his millennial touchstone Garden State with Portman in mind; and Moby, the musician who claimed in his own memoir that he and Portman dated when he was 33 years old and she was just 20. Portman remembered their relationship very differently: “I was surprised to hear that he characterized the very short time that I knew him as dating because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school,” she told Harper’s Bazaar UK in 2019. “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. There was no fact-checking from him or his publisher—it almost feels deliberate. That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me.”
Then there’s Jonathan Safran Foer, whose 20-teens-era friendship with the actor has long been the subject of rumor and speculation; a T Magazine story reprinting their emails only raised more questions. It even inspired a storyline in a 2023 Off-Broadway play called The Wanderers, which is—among other things—about a nebbish Brooklyn novelist falling in love with a glamorous actress who doesn’t return his affection. Katie Holmes played the actress, wearing a short, brown, Portman-esque wig.
Just before the pandemic, Manhattan’s MCC Theater staged a show called All the Natalie Portmans, about a gay Black teenage cinephile who envisions the actor as a kind of manic pixie imaginary friend. Though she wasn’t involved with either play, Portman, too, has occasionally skewered her own image: The disconnect between her good-girl guise and the idea of her breaking bad fueled a viral SNL digital short Portman made in 2006, and a sequel released in 2018. That filthy first song was apparently Portman’s idea. (She wanted the world to know that she could rap.)
Portman must be aware, then, that over 30-odd years of stardom, she’s become a strange sort of lightning rod, the kind of actor who often gets thrust into other people’s narratives even when she’s not playing a part. Perhaps that’s because she possesses several contrasting attributes, disparities that evidently drive people crazy: Portman is not only beautiful but also a Harvard grad. She’s not only a sophisticate but also the star of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. Culture writers have argued (not unconvincingly!) that she’s at her best onscreen when she’s playing a bad actor. This spring, she revealed that she’s pregnant with her third child; the very notion was enough to set off a fresh round of chatter about middle-aged women having babies, sending otherwise rational novelists into tailspins.