In an interview in February’s Elle magazine, actress Natalie Portman admits she avoids playing Jewish characters.
“I’ve always tried to stay away from playing Jews,” she told the mag. “I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre.” As far as her role as a Hasidic bride in the recent “New York I Love You,” Portman says it was the first Jewish character that “intrigued” her.
She isn’t terribly fond of romantic comedies either, telling the magazine, “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do comedy. It’s just that I would only get offered girlfriend parts in guy comedies, which aren’t exciting to me, or those offensive roles in romantic comedies where the woman has to have a job in fashion so that she can have nice clothes, and her goal is always marriage.”
Apparently she prefers to play Indian princesses as she did in her ex-boyfriend’s wacky Bollywood video (see below). And speaking of boyfriends, I hear she has a new one: rumors have her dating up-and-coming ballet choreographer Benjamin Millepied who trained her for her role in Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” Millepied trained in France and is currently a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet, though that seems to be the least of his accomplishments.
According to Vogue:
Even while continuing to dance, Millepied, 32, has choreographed works for ABT, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and his own touring ensemble, Danses Concertantes. Deeply committed to new music, he has commissioned scores from composers like Nico Muhly and Thierry Escaich, the celebrated French organist with whom he will premiere a work at NYCB this spring. “I enjoy making large-group works a lot now,” he says. “That’s what a real choreographer is supposed to be able to do. It takes a lot more—it’s composing a ballet like composing a score.” He’s also branching into film, as the choreographer for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a psychological thriller about ballerinas starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. “The interesting thing is to be working with someone who knows how to tell a story,” he says.
Portman as Princess Carmensita:
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