14 DAY TRIAL // It was the role that earned her a much-deserved Oscar award and for which she prepared intensely for a long time, training and losing weight. However, Natalie Portman’s claims that she did most of the dance routines in “Black Swan” are being challenged by a professional ballerina: her body double.
Before the film was released to much critical acclaim, Portman said that, while she couldn’t have done the most complicated routines, she did most of the dancing in the film.
The same was stressed by her fiancé Benjamin Millepied, who is also the film’s choreographer: in a recent interview, he stated that Natalie did about 85 percent of the dancing in “Black Swan.”
Sarah Lane, a 27-year-old American Ballet Theatre soloist, tells EW that this is far from the truth: Portman really did about 5 percent of the dancing, since the rest was done by her, by Sarah.
Lane is not credited in the film as a body double, which is what hurt her the most, she says. However, the decision to speak out comes after Millepied’s claims that she was not as involved in the making of the film as she knows she was.
Moreover, Lane insists, the movie studio barred her from speaking out on it until after the Oscars – all in a bid to create the impression that Portman was able to do all that she’s seen doing on film.
“The shots that are just her face with arms, those shots are definitely Natalie. But that doesn’t show the actual dancing. They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” Lane tells EW.
“It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?” she adds.
She’s not out to deny that Portman was not a good actress or that she didn’t deserve her Oscar, the ballerina stresses. She just doesn’t want people to think she’s also a ballet dancer – because she’s not.
“I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer,” Lane says.
In a joint statement, the movie studio stands by its star, saying “Natalie herself did most of the dancing featured in the final film.”