Interview with Natalie Portman, star of Black Swan

* A version of this article appears, in Spanish (a language I don't speak), in a recent issue of Fotogramas magazine...

Is that really her? With movie stars, you usually know right away. But when Natalie Portman enters the room, it's almost easy to miss her. We're in Venice, on a sunny afternoon in September, just after the world premiere of her new film, Black Swan, and though critics are already pronouncing it the hit of the festival on just the second day, Portman doesn't seem too anxious to meet the press. Wearing a purple, sleeveless Miu-Miu dress more suited to the evening than this time of day, and just five foot three inches tall, she seems quite lost and disorientated as she takes a seat, as if, to quote the title of one of her lesser-known movie titles, she would rather be Anywhere But Here.

Publicity is the side of the job that Portman clearly does not relish. After all, this is an actress who changed her stage name from Hershlag to protect her family's privacy, who turned down a cosmetics contract at the age of ten because she thought modelling would be “stupid” and “boring”, and who, after landing a major role in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, dropped out to go to Harvard for four years to study psychology. But at the age of 29, she is going to have to get used to the attention. Though it seemed for a while that Portman might be happy to walk away from Hollywood altogether, Black Swan proves that acting is definitely where her heart is. She's the same age as Jessica Alba, Paris Hilton and Bryce Dallas Howard, but this performance finally sets her apart from the crowd: both physically and emotionally, it's a tour de force.

“I think university taught me how hard I could work,” she muses. “Y'know, the first time you get your reading list for the week, and there's, like 1,000 pages to read in four days, your stomach drops. But then you see that you can do that amount of work, and you can create your own thing from these materials. And that's really helpful when you're doing a movie like this – to be able to work that hard, and really throw yourself into it. It gave me the confidence to think I could do it.”

Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan is almost literally a sister piece to his Oscar-nominated drama The Wrestler. Portman plays Nina Sayers, a ballerina who lives at home with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), herself a former dance star who lives vicariously through her daughter. Nina is desperate to win the lead role in her company's new production of Swan Lake, but the director, Thomas (Vincent Cassell), doesn't think she has it in her: the ballet requires her to play not one but two roles, the virginal Swan Queen and the slutty Black Swan. As Nina frets, she becomes obsessed with a new girl, Lily (Mila Kunis), who seems to be undermining her, trying to steal her thunder. Provoked by Thomas, and threatened by Lily, Nina starts to confront her inhibitions, unaware that what she sees as freedom may actually be a form of madness.

It's a difficult enough role just in terms of the reality of Nina's life: how much is fantasy? But on top of this, Portman – just like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler – had to perform as the character too. “I did ballet until I was 13, so I had a base,” she says. “But I started the training for this when I was 28, so I'd had 15 years of not doing anything and getting older. I mean, 28 is toward the end of a ballerina's career, or the height. It's not when you start!” She laughs. “It was probably the most difficult, demanding...” She stops. “No, it was easily the most physically demanding role I've done. I started training a year before we started shooting, and I had to continue the training through filming too, so on top of 16-hour days, I was training before and after work. It was very extreme.”

Interestingly enough, she originally gave up, she says, on account of her competitive nature. “That's when I really started acting more seriously. I'm very all or nothing. When I stopped dancing, I was only doing two or three hours a day, and I obviously couldn't keep up that pace. And it was hard for me to go to a class and not be with, y'know, the serious girls. That was hard for me.”

So when Aronofsky offered her the part, did she ever feel that she might be out of her depth here too? Her eyes light up. “No!” she insists. “Everything that scared me about it was also what drew me to it. It was an amazing opportunity to challenge myself both emotionally and physically. Now, I am not a danger-seeker. I like extreme experiences, but not ones that I feel would threaten my life. But, work-wise, I try to do things that scare me, because I know they're gonna challenge me. Even so, I didn't know what I was letting myself in for, I didn't realise what it was gonna be like. But it was amazing; it's a total cliché but it's true: the more you put in, the more you get out.”

Key to Portman's performance, she states, is Aronofsky, who drew similarly unexplored depths from Rourke in The Wrestler. “Darren's incredible,” she says. “I don't know if he's like this with everyone, but I've never had it before with a director, where there was a sort of telepathy. I just felt that we were so in the same zone. We're both very extreme, we're both very focused and very disciplined. So we were just sort of in this zone where he would say half a word to me and I would understand what he meant. He was always playing, and we would get excited when we would discover new things together. He's very focused, very present, always, always on. It can be 5am and he will not lose his intensity. He's also very kind, and I trust him. So I was willing to do anything.”

As in The Wrestler, Black Swan is a film about suffering for art. “There are so many rituals,” Portman reflects, “like the way the dancers prepare their shoes. Every performance they prepare a new pair of shoes – and it's the same ritual, scraping and breaking the shoes apart, tying them exactly right.” She pauses. “And the suffering. There's so much pain.”

And as far as pain was concerned, Portman just went with the flow. “There wasn't much time to dwell on it,” she shrugs. “It was almost like one of those survival situations, where you don't even think about it, you just keep moving forward. We were on a very low budget, so we were shooting so fast and so much. We did so many scenes ever day, and we were working very, very long days. The trainer I had was so amazing, cos, y'know, it's really important to warm up. But what was crazy was that I had to warm up every time before a scene. So we'd have to do a whole barre every time, to make sure that, dancing en pointe at 4am, I wasn't going to tear any ligaments.”

But what makes the character of Nina truly unique is the pathos that Portman puts into her offstage persona. Onstage, she is proud and confident, but, behind the scenes , Nina is a bundle of nerves, fidgety, paranoid and always the outsider. “Darren definitely isolated me from the rest of the cast,” she says. “But, really, the lifestyle was such that I didn't do anything except work for the year that I was preparing for this. I didn't have any life, so that part of the character was not hard to get to.”

The result is a film that works perfectly as the kind of psychological thriller once pioneered by Roman Polanski, whose early films Repulsion and The Tenant godfathered Black Swan. Though it contains elements of fantasy, Aronofsky's film works best as a dark, psychotic dream, in which the boundaries are always blurred. “The way Darren would do it,” says Portman, “was to ask me questions – and I didn't have to tell him the answer!” She laughs. “But I did have to decide some things for myself. Which was very important. He would say, 'Is Nina a virgin?' Or, 'Is this really happening?' Because there's obviously so many times in the film where you can't tell, and it should always be ambiguous about whether what we're seeing is real or in her imagination, because that allows you to feel her experience of the insanity. So it was very helpful, because he didn't always make me reveal it to him – and we could even have a difference in opinion.”

But although Portman feels enriched by the experience, this is definitely as far as it goes. “I love dancing,” she says, “but I'm definitely hanging up the ballet shoes.” So how did she celebrate her first day of freedom? With a blow-out? A long lie-in? “Unfortunately, not,” she laughs. “Actually, the day after I wrapped, one of my very good friends got married, so that was the first thing I did. Which was very beautiful. So I got to see friends. And then I was just at home, trying to regain my life. Y'know, see friends, sleep, eat... All the things I hadn't been doing for a year.”

And though it won't be anything like as back-breaking as Black Swan, 2011 is going to be pretty busy year too. On the work front alone, she has films as diverse as the medieval stoner comedy Your Highness, the offbeat indie drama Hesher, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Kenneth Branagh's big-budget upmarket comic-book adaptation Thor. “I like trying everything,” she explains. “I want to always do things I haven't done before. That's my main criteria. And also things that interest me in the moment relate to things I might feel in my own life that I feel I can explore with the roles.”

And in her private life, Portman is busy too, pregnant with her first child, after becoming engaged to choreographer Benjamin Millepied, whom she met on the set of Black Swan. Would she let that child become a dancer? “Probably...” she ponders “...not. I mean, obviously I would encourage my child's dreams. And there's something extremely beautiful about dancers, because it's an art where there are //no// superficial rewards. you don't get fame. Well, in a certain circle you do. But for the most part you don't get fame and you don't get money. It's really for the pure art and pure love of what they're doing.” She gives a wistful smile. “It can be a very cruel world.”