At just 11 years old, Natalie Portman fell in love with many in her role as Matilda in
The Professional (León)
, the 1994 film by Luc Besson in which she played a girl whose family has been murdered and is forced to handle weapons from the hand of the Leon hitman, to whom he declares his love.
Two years later, he released
Beautiful Girls
, the Ted Demme film whose story revolves around how the protagonist, Timoty Hutton, has a deep desire for a young Portman, just 13 years old.
These roles that consecrated the Israeli interpreter also made her an object of desire, barely having reached the age of majority.
Something that now, at 39, the winner of an Oscar for
Black Swan
has revealed what it meant to her.
"Being sexualized as a child took away my own sexuality because it scared me," Portman said on
Dax Shepard's
Armchair Expert podcast
.
"I was definitely aware of how they portrayed me, mainly in the type of journalism that existed when the movies came out, like that figure of Lolita and those things," she continued before explaining that it was thanks to her strong personality that made her feel safe .
"The only way I could be sure was by saying, 'I'm conservative and I'm serious, and you have to respect me, and I'm smart and don't look at me that way."
“So many people had this impression of me that I was very serious, prudish and conservative as I grew up… I consciously cultivated it because it was a way of making me feel safe.
If someone respects you, they won't make you feel like an object, "said Portman, who defines herself as" boring. "
In 1997, Portman was offered the title role of
Lolita
, Adrian Lyne's film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokovse's 1955 book about a middle-aged man who becomes sexually involved with a girl as young as 12.
She rejected it due to the explicit and lewd content.
Rejecting roles and refusing to make kissing, love, or sex scenes became part of the self-defense techniques of Portman who preferred to play roles more appropriate to his age in
Mars Attack
and
The Phantom Menace
.
“As is normal, at that age you have your own sexuality, your own desire, and you want to explore things, and you want to be open, but you don't feel safe, especially when there are older men who are interested in you and you have to tell them: ' No, no, no, no, no ”, has counted in the program.
It is not the first time that Portman has spoken of the importance of not sexualizing girls for their work in film or television.
The star, who married French choreographer Benjamin Millepied in 2012 with whom she has two children, has spoken out on the subject before.
“I excitedly opened my first fan letter to read a rape fantasy that a man had written to me, and a radio show started a countdown to my eighteenth birthday, the date it would be legal to sleep with me.
Film critics were talking about my budding breasts in their reviews, ”Natalie Portman declared during the 2018 Women's March in Los Angeles.