14 DAY TRIAL // Natalie Portman must be one of the most beloved actresses of our times, even if for the sole reason that no one can seem to find a reason to hate her, as it usually happens with celebrities. In the latest issue of Marie Claire magazine, the star talks fame and what it means to her, while also recalling a few things about her past, like the first time she smoked pot or how it felt to get drunk in college.
It’s clear that Portman is not a regular girl, therefore anything she does – or did – is also out of the ordinary. She attended, as fans must know, Harvard University but she is not shy to admit that she was a late bloomer in terms of doing what other youths usually do when they’re away from home for a longer while for the first time. More specifically, Portman speaks of smoking pot and getting drunk.
“OK, so I didn’t really go to high school parties and yeah, I didn’t touch pot till I was in my 20s. I didn’t get flat-out drunk until I went to college. But I think that’s a good thing in many ways,” the star says. For one, doing this kind of stuff when she was already at an age when she could make the right decisions helped a lot. This somehow balanced the Cinderella factor about her life, and which made of her a girl that could have everything at a gesture of the hand, she says.
Granted, fame does have its disadvantages. Even if Portman has learned to live with them and, most importantly, to deal with the biggest, that of loss of privacy, there still are times when she feels as if trapped for the mere reason that she doesn’t know what to do to make things right again. The same happened, Natalie explains, when rumors started to emerge that she was dating Sean Penn back in 2008 and she simply couldn’t do anything to put them to rest.
“He’s obviously someone I’m friends with I mean, not ‘hey, wassup?’ friends, but we were all on the [Cannes 2008] jury together – Alfonso [Cuarón] and Marjane [Satrapi] –and we had a really great time, and then… It was one of those things where you’re like, ‘Oh, my God! I’m that person who’s caught in this [expletive] rumor brigade.’ You can’t win. You don’t say anything and everyone’s like, ‘It’s true.’ You say something, and you’re keeping the story alive. It’s bad, bad news,” Natalie says.