Natalie Portman Recalls “Being Sexualized as a Child”: I Was Portrayed as a “Lolita Figure”

Natalie Portman is opening up about the long-term impact her earliest roles had on her psyche. In a new interview on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Portman revealed that playing sexualized characters in films like Beautiful Girls and Léon: The Professional made her “afraid” of her own sexuality for many years to come. “Being sexualized as a child, I think, took away from my own sexuality,” she said. “You don’t feel safe, necessarily, when there’s, like, older men that are interested, and you’re like, ‘No, no, no, no.'”

When asked about her breakout roles in 1994 thriller The Professional (titled Léon: The Professional  internationally) and 1996 drama Beautiful Girls, in which her 13-year-old character develops a relationship with a man played by Timothy Hutton, Portman said that she was “aware” that she was being portrayed as “this Lolita figure.” The actress explained that “being sexualized” at such a young age complicated her thoughts about her own sexuality, and she attempted to reverse course by picking completely different roles.

“It made me feel like the way I could be safe was to be like, ‘I’m conservative,’ and ‘I’m serious and you should respect me,’ and ‘I’m smart,’ and ‘Don’t look at me that way,'” Portman told Shepard. “But at that age, you do have your own sexuality, and you do have your own desire, and you do want to explore things, and you do want to be open.”

After Beautiful Girls, Portman insisted that she didn’t “want to have any love scenes of make-out scenes,” and she explained that she “would start choosing parts that were less sexy because it made me worried about the way I was perceived and how safe I felt.”

“I feel like you build these fortresses around you, and also take on — so many people had this impression of me that I was super serious and prude and conservative,” she continued. “And as I get older, and I realize, I consciously cultivated that because it was ways to make me feel safe. It was, ‘Oh, if someone respects you, they’re not going to objectify you.'”

“All of us think, ‘What are the things that have kept me from being free? What are the things inside of me, and what are the things other people have put on me that have stopped me or blocked me in any way from being completely free?'” concluded Portman. “Just as a public person at a young age, and then as a public female at a young age, in my attempts to build these fortresses that kept me safe, that succeeded in keeping me safe, it didn’t allow a full expression of who I was at that time.”

Listen to Natalie Portman’s full interview on Armchair Expert.