Natalie Portman Her 5 Most Iconic Roles (& 5 Movies That Wasted Her Talents)

Natalie Portman: Her 5 Most Iconic Roles (& 5 Movies That Wasted Her Talents)

While Natalie Portman is an accomplished actress who won an Oscar for her role in Black Swan, she still has some dud roles in her filmography.

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Starting off at the age of 12 with an unforgettable performance in Léon: The Professional and picking up a coveted Harvard education and a relentless barrage of Star Wars prequel backlash along the way, Natalie Portman has emerged as one of the finest actors in film history.

Unfortunately, she’s not always given characters and stories that are worthy of her transcendent talents. For every great movie she’s starred in, there are a handful of mediocre duds and even a couple of trash-heaps. So, here are Natalie Portman’s five most iconic roles, as well as five movies that wasted her talents.

10 Most Iconic: Léon: The Professional

Natalie Portman’s first ever film role still stands as one of her best and most memorable. Alongside Jean Reno’s subdued portrayal of the titular hitman and Gary Oldman’s chilling performance as the sinister Norman Stansfield, Portman’s humanized take on Mathilda (a character who could’ve easily disappeared into genre cinema’s suspension of disbelief) completed the central trifecta that made Léon great.

9 Wasted Her: No Strings Attached

No Strings Attached was released in 2011, the same year as Friends with Benefits, a movie with an almost identical premise, and they’re both so painfully formulaic that anyone who saw both of them could be forgiven for not being able to distinguish one from the other.

What’s even more dreadful is that this travesty hit theaters the same year that Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her breathtaking performance in Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller Black Swan.

8 Most Iconic: Annihilation

Alex Garland’s Annihilation took a unique approach to depicting alien life on the screen. Instead of little green men who want to take over the world, Garland depicted extraterrestrials who have no logic or reason and can’t even really be comprehended by the human mind.

Natalie Portman stars as Lena, whose husband was killed by the aliens. She heads into “the Shimmer” and finds some truly haunting things. Portman’s committed performance takes viewers on the terrifying journey with her.

7 Wasted Her: Your Highness

On paper, a stoner comedy set in a Middle-earth-esque fantasy kingdom from the team behind Pineapple Express starring Natalie Portman sounds fantastic. Unfortunately, in execution, Your Highness is pretty awful.

The jokes are forced and juvenile, and every scene is dragged out until it’s been stretched razor-thin. Portman’s SNL appearances have proven she’s got comedic chops; if she’s going to be utilized in a comedy, it should be a lot smarter than this.

6 Most Iconic: V For Vendetta

After Fight Club whetted the moviegoing public’s appetite for anarchism, James McTeigue’s dystopian thriller V for Vendetta put that anarchistic streak into overdrive.

Hugo Weaving’s V is the main draw of the movie, but Natalie Portman’s Evey is the one who introduces us to his world after he saves her from London’s crooked secret police.

5 Wasted Her: The Other Boleyn Girl

Screenwriter Peter Morgan is usually pretty adept at dramatizing history, but The Other Boleyn Girl was a bitter disappointment. A fictionalized version of Mary Boleyn’s affair with her sister’s husband Henry VIII starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and Eric Bana might sound like it’s worth a watch, but its soapy melodrama makes it a bore.

4 Most Iconic: Jackie

In the underrated, poignant, masterfully crafted Jackie, Natalie Portman plays former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy at possibly the most difficult time in her life: the days directly following the assassination of her husband. Narratives about the Kennedy assassination are often told from the perspective of Secret Service agents looking for the culprit, or conspiracy theorists trying to figure out who really did it.

But the First Lady’s perspective is the most emotionally devastating — being right at JFK’s side when it happened, keeping a brave face in front of her kids, being in the public eye, etc. — and Portman plays her spectacularly.

3 Wasted Her: Lucy In The Sky

Squandering a compelling if psychologically inaccurate premise, Lucy in the Sky doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Natalie Portman does everything she can in the lead role, but the muddled script doesn’t give her much room to breathe.

2 Most Iconic: Black Swan

The crown jewel in Natalie Portman’s filmography, Black Swan might forever remain the actor’s finest film. Inspired by The Red Shoes and Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Darren Aronofsky needed a seriously dedicated, talented performer to bring Nina Sayers (and her doppelganger) to life on the big screen.

Portman was the ideal choice, subtly portraying both the tortured soul of an obsessive artist and the frazzled mental state of a woman with undiagnosed psychological issues.

1 Wasted Her: Thor: The Dark World

After being sidelined as generic love interest Jane Foster in 2011’s Thor, Natalie Portman got sidelined even more in 2013’s Thor: The Dark World. When Loki became a fan favorite after The Avengers, Portman’s role in The Dark World was reduced so much that she was little more than a benign presence in most of her scenes, leading Portman to quit the Marvel rat race.

Fortunately, she is finally about to get her due in the MCU, as Taika Waititi will be giving her Thor’s hammer and godly powers in the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/natalie-portman-most-iconic-roles-movies-wasted-talent/

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