YAZM!

Yesterday, we showed the cover for the February issue of Elle UK with Natalie Portman as cover girl. At the time, I didn’t have any interview excerpts from Elle UK, but now Huffington Post does. Natalie sounds… weird. She’s been giving a lot of weird interviews lately, hasn’t she? Like when she whined about being “bullied” by Hollywood. Maybe she’s going through something? Or maybe this is the woman she is now - self-absorbed, playing the victim, whining, et cetera.

Anyway, the most notable thing so far to come out this Elle UK interview is the revelation that Natalie - who was born in Israel, and who doesn’t like talking about her Jewish faith, and who defends Israeli artists - doesn’t want to play Jews in films. She says she “hates” the Holocaust genre of film (She hates Schindler‘s List?), and the first time she ever considered playing a Jewish girl was in New York, I Love You because she was “intrigued”.

Natalie Portman covers February’s Elle UK, and in her interview she discusses the sorts of roles she doesn’t like to take on–overtly Jewish characters, one-dimensional girlfriends and sex bombs.

Earlier this year Jerusalem-born Natalie broke one of her rules and played a Hasidic bride in ‘New York, I Love You.’ She now stars in the war drama ‘Brothers’ opposite Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire.

On playing Jewish characters:
“I’ve always tried to stay away from playing Jews. I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre. That was the first thing to come my way (New York, I Love You) that really intrigued me.”

On rom-com roles:
“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.”

On her role as a precocious 12-year-old in ‘Leon’ (’The Professional’):
“There was a lot of controversy about the whole Lolita thing. My parents were super-protective about it, but I got a lot of weird letters. It was really upsetting. I didn’t want to be seen as a sex object, so I went in the opposite direction. I’m definitely not a prude about sex or nudity, I just don’t want to do something that will end up as a screen grab on a porn site.”

[From Elle UK via Huffington Post]

Um… she did nudity and sex(y) scenes in Closer and Hotel Chevalier. Does she think we’ve forgotten? And yes, her scenes (especially in Hotel Chevalier) were dissected heavily and there are photos of Natalie’s ass all over the internet. So, while I don’t blame her for being wary of doing nudity and sex scenes, it’s weird that she’s still pushing that line after she’s already done a few films where she was a sex object.

Elle UK photos (photographer David Slijper) courtesy of Fashion Gone Rogue.

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