Revealed to the world in "Léon" at the age of twelve, actress Nathalie Portman admits that this film weighed on her life as a woman.
For the needs of the Armchair Expert podcast, hosted by Dax Shepard on December 7, Nathalie Portman returned to her childhood in the spotlight. And more precisely on the repercussions of her role in the film "Leon" by Luc Besson, in 1994, when she was twelve years old. Over the course of her conversation, the star explains that she did not have the right to freely express her personality. A reality imposed by the film industry on very young actors "Being sexualized at such a young age took me away from my own sexuality because it scared me, explains Nathalie Portman to Dax Shepard, (…) So many people felt like I was super serious, prudish and very old fashioned as I grew up. But it was something that I consciously cultivated, because it made me feel safe. If someone respects you, that person will not try to reduce you to a simple object", she added.
Deconstruct a fabricated image
Nathalie Portman reveals that this weight so early on her shoulders conditioned her future choices of cinema performances. She refused the role of the remake of the feature film "Lolita" by Kubrick. A new film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's book that highlights the sexual attraction between a 12-year-old girl and a middle-aged man. The actress didn't want to appear in explicit scenes that would only fuel the fantasies about her even more. Likewise, she refused scenes of kisses or love in certain films, a certain technique of self-defense, announces the actress. “At this age, you have your own sexuality, and you have your own desires, and you want to explore that… But you don't feel safe either. So you are building a fortress.", she says. To demonstrate the setbacks of this early media coverage and human stupidity, Natalie Portman recalls an episode in her life," sexual terrorism "as she calls it. She says she suffered from 'a radio station abject sexual media treatment, this station having set up a countdown to its 18th birthday: "a roundabout way of indicating the legal age when it was going to be possible to sleep with me", specifies the actress.
Hypersexualized from childhood or adolescence
The interpreter of Padmé Amidala in Star Wars is not the only woman to have had all her unhealthy looks during her early youth. In a speech at the launch of the HeForShe campaign in 2014, Emma Watson spoke about the sexualization she suffered as a teenager: "When, at the age of 14, I started to be sexualized by the press, when, at 15, my friends stopped playing sports so as not to 'risk' putting on too much muscle, when, when I was 18, my boy friends couldn't talk about their feelings, so I decided I was a feminist. " Even his partner in Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe had pushed in the middle of an interview for Associated Press a rant on the sexualization of the actress by the press and the fans. "Well, the male population had no problem sexualizing Emma Watson immediately", he said at the time. Recently, last August, Natalia Dyer, who plays the character of Nancy Wheeler, asked the media to stop the hypersexualization of the young stars of the hit series "Stranger Things", reported 20 minutes. The debate is therefore not about to be over.