< Natalie Portman: Going Dark For Thriller 'Black Swan'

July 07, 2024

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DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

Completing our visit with some of the actresses up for Academy Awards this weekend, we present Terry Gross's interview with Natalie Portman, who is nominated for Best Actress as the star of the dark and twisted ballet drama Black Swan.

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Ms. NATALIE PORTMAN (Actor): (as Nina Sayers) I had the craziest dream last night, about a girl who was turned into a swan, but her prince falls for the wrong girl, and she kills herself.

BIANCULLI: That's Natalie Portman in "Black Swan", playing a ballerina in a New York City ballet company that is about to do its annual performance of "Swan Lake." She gets the lead, playing the dual role of the innocent white swan and the seductive and evil black swan.

In the process of preparing for the role, she goes deep into her dark side and confuses both herself and the film's audience about where reality ends and paranoid fantasy begins. The film was directed by Darren Aronofsky, who also directed "The Wrestler."

Natalie Portman made her film debut at the age of 12 in the 1994 film "The Professional." Her other movies include "Garden State," "The Other Boleyn Girl," and the three "Star Wars" prequels.

Terry Gross spoke with Natalie Portman in 2010.

Natalie Portman, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Ms. PORTMAN: Thank you so much for having me on.

GROSS: So what was the preparation like for you to try to develop a ballerina's body and movement?

Ms. PORTMAN: I started training a year ahead of time with a great teacher, Mary Helen Bowers, who was in the New York City Ballet for 10 years. She started very basic with me, really focusing on strengthening my toes. We would do 15 minutes of just toe exercises a day to get ready for going en pointe, plus obviously ballet. And then we upped it to, you know, we added more time as we went along, more hours a day of ballet, and we added swimming.

We swam a mile a day. We toned. I watched the Frederick Wiseman documentaries on ABT and Paris Opera Ballet, which were really helpful, and read a lot of autobiographies of dancers.

I tried to do mainly New York City Ballet dancers because I thought it was important to locate it in a particular culture, to have a sort of specific world, because every company is very different. So it was sort of Balanchine-era New York City Ballet that gave me the background.

GROSS: Are there things you have to do in ballet that you had to learn how to do that a human body would otherwise never do?

Ms. PORTMAN: Absolutely. The turnout is extreme and, you know, something that is not natural for a lot of bodies. I think because I had the dance training when I was little, it wasn't impossible for me to have turnout starting at 27.

GROSS: Describe what turnout is.

Ms. PORTMAN: Turnout is having your sort of - from your hips to your toes pointing outwards instead of being parallel to each other. And, you know, everything is supposed to be turned out, every move, every, you know, tendu or grand battement, you need to be turned out.

You have to sort of tuck your butt underneath and, like, pull in your stomach towards your back so that your back becomes flat and doesn't have an arch, which is not very natural for the spine.

And, of course, going en pointe is also very unusual. It's not a natural way for your body to hold itself.

GROSS: So what happened to your feet in the process?

Ms. PORTMAN: They get disgusting. Toenails fall off. You know, they get blistered and calloused, and you don't want anyone to look at them and certainly not touch them.

GROSS: What about the rest of your body? I read you, what, you dislocated a rib? Do I have that right?

Ms. PORTMAN: Yeah, that was the sort of worst injury I had, was a dislocated rib, which basically we just dealt with by not - I didn't...

GROSS: By not breathing.

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Ms. PORTMAN: Yeah, exactly. No deep breaths for six weeks, and I didn't get lifted from my ribcage anymore. I got lifted under my armpits, because that's sort of what does it. Yeah, but it wasn't the end of the world. You know, real dancers dance with such incredible injuries that you wouldn't even believe. You know, it's such a nightmare for them to be replaced.

You know, once they've made it to the top and they get these great roles, they will dance on a sprained ankle or torn plantar fascia or twisted necks, you know, just to make sure that they can keep their moment.

GROSS: There are some very gruesome, disturbing body images in the film. Maybe gruesome isn't exactly the right word, almost surreal. Like there's an image where your toes are completely stuck together. It's almost as if they'd grown into each other. And you're like trying to like pry them apart.

And then there's an image of you peeling skin off your hand, you know, as if it's dry skin and you're peeling it off and, like, a whole bunch of skin comes off.

And then you have this rash on your back, we're never really sure what caused that or what it is, and it keeps getting bigger and uglier. You crack your feet and you crack your toes.

Like some of this reminded me of the kind of, like, body imagery you're likely to get in a surreal dream.

Ms. PORTMAN: Right, absolutely. Darren Aronofsky, our director, who's clearly unbelievable, he is so good at physicalizing anxiety and terror and obsession. And that's so much of it for dancers. I mean it's all about the way your body looks and the way your body move.

And when your worst anxiety and your worst terror is that you're going to be prevented from moving or, you know, that your toes would stick together or that, you know, that your skin wouldn't be pale enough, or your body wouldn't be thin enough, I mean these are real ideals that people talk about. And obviously any blemishes would be the worst nightmare to cover.

GROSS: When you accepted the part in "Black Swan," and you were working with, you know, professional ballet choreographers and trainers, were people sizing you up and thinking, like, oh, this is going to be tough -you know, she doesn't really have a ballet dancer's body and we're going to have to...

Ms. PORTMAN: Oh yeah...

GROSS: ...like stretch this and change that and move this and...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. PORTMAN: Oh yeah.

GROSS: Is that a weird process, having people assess you and finding you, like, wanting and then figuring out how to fix you?

Ms. PORTMAN: It was, and, you know, it's also you have physical limitations. You know, I have - I'm short and I have short limbs. And, you know, the Balanchine sort of City Ballet ideal is to be very long. And they had me working with a physical therapist, Sash Jairotani's(ph) teacher, Michelle Rodriguez(ph), who's fantastic, who works with all the dancers in New York, to lengthen me.

And she was literally just pulling my arms and opening my back and, you know, having me over a ball. I would be lying on this sort of small ball and she would just open my shoulders and open my back and do arm exercises to try and slim my arms and lengthen them.

I was given instructions to lose as much weight as I could without getting sick and, you know, was told every day sort of by the coaches and stuff that I wasn't looking like a ballerina yet.

And all of a sudden, when I really started dieting and lost a serious amount of weight, all of a sudden I started getting compliments from everyone. But it was very much like what that world is.

GROSS: Now, Mila Kunis co-stars, and she plays a new dancer in the company, and the ballet master thinks that she's very good. And, in fact, she becomes your understudy. And it's always hard to tell whether she's trying to be your best friend or trying to totally undermine you so that she can take over as the lead. And this is where the thriller aspect...

Ms. PORTMAN: Right.

GROSS: ... of the movie comes in. Now, I read, and tell me if this is true, that the director of the film, Darren Aronofsky, actually created a backstage competition between the two of you, that he would tell you that she was doing better than you were in terms of really getting the ballet moves down. And then he'd tell her that you were doing better than she was.

Ms. PORTMAN: Exactly.

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GROSS: So did he actually do that?

Ms. PORTMAN: Yeah, it was really funny because Mila and I have been friends for years. And when we were - you know, Darren and I have been talking about the film for 10 years, and finally when it started rolling, a year ahead of time, he said, you know, do you have any ideas for who could play Lily?

And I was at the flea market with Mila, and I was telling her that I was doing the ballet training. And she's, like, oh, be careful. I broke all of my toes doing ballet.

And so I called up Darren, and I was like: Mila dances. Mila dances. So then, you know, he met her and cast her, which was really exciting, to work with a friend.

But then I was, like, why can't we train together? You know, we're doing the same thing. Can't we take class? He kept us completely separate. He tried to make us, like, not see each other. And then he would tell me things like: Mila's looking really good. And then he would tell her, like: Oh, Natalie's so much better than you.

And we would talk. So we knew that he was totally just messing with us. And we would just laugh because, you know, we'd go out for our salad or whatever we were eating at the time and, you know, dish on what he was, what kind of feedback he was giving each of us. So we didn't really let him manipulate us as he, as he desired.

BIANCULLI: Natalie Portman, speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. Natalie Portman, Jacki Weaver and Melissa Leo will all learn whether they've won Oscars on Sunday night when ABC televises the 83rd annual Academy Awards.

Coming up, David Edelstein reviews the new Farrelly brothers' comedy "Hall Pass."

This is FRESH AIR.

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