After acting for nearly 30 years, Natalie Portman has one very important rule about the roles she accepts, and it involves her two children.
The Star Wars franchise star, 42, appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show on Tuesday, December 5, and during a round of “Pop Quiz,” she read a card that asked her to name “one thing you’d never do for a role.”
After Portman commented, “That’s a good one,” she responded. “Um … show my boobs? Is that really prude?”
Barrymore, 48, immediately interjected, “No, it’s not!” Then Portman explained her answer.
“I’m just always like, ‘I don’t want my kids to see pictures online,'” continued the Oscar winner, who shares son Aleph, 12, and daughter Amalia, 6, with estranged husband Benjamin Millepied.
“I didn’t know there’d be an ‘online’ when I did it,” replied Barrymore, whose first topless scene was in the 1993 film Doppelganger when she was 18.
“I was like, ‘Good luck finding that magazine under some weird guy’s bed in some random house!'” Barrymore joked. “But no judgment, darlings.”
Both Portman and Barrymore began their acting careers as children. Portman’s first role was as the star of 1994 film Leon: The Professional when she was 13 years old. The next year, she appeared in Heat with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. She worked regularly in her youth, but don’t expect to see her own kids following in her footsteps as child entertainers.
“I would not encourage young people to go into this. I don’t mean ever; I mean as children,” Portman said on Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast on November 23.
“I feel it was almost an accident of luck that I was not harmed, also combined with very overprotective, wonderful parents,” she added. “You don’t like it when you’re a kid, and you’re grateful for it when you’re an adult.”
During the 2018 Women’s March in Los Angeles, Portman expressed how the success of Leon: The Professional drew unwanted attention to her sexuality at a young age.
“I was so excited at 13 when the film was released, and my work and my art would have a human response. I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me,” Portman said at the time. “A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews.”
Although Portman says conditions for child actors have improved, she is firm about not wanting her kids to act while they are growing up.
“I’ve heard too many bad stories to think that any children should be part of it,” Portman said. “Having said that, I know all the conversations that we’ve been having these past few years. It’s made people more aware and careful. But ultimately, I don’t believe that kids should work. I think kids should play and go to school.”
