How is Natalie Portman only 41?

And she just turned 41 a month ago. Before that she was only (gasp) 40.

It feels more likely that Portman has been appearing in movies for 40 years than that this is her age. That's because she did two things in the 1990s that both made her seem older than she really was.

The first of course was appearing in Leon, a.k.a. The Professional, when she was only 12 going on 13 during filming. That film was released in late 1994. The point is that she's young in that movie, but the things that happen to her are very grown up, and her acting ability belied her young age. She was the original Millie Bobby Brown, or maybe the latter day Jodie Foster. 

Then five years later it was Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, when she would have been 17 going on 18. Given what we know about moviemaking, it's far more common to get a 22-year-old to play a 17-year-old, not an actual 17-year-old. If this were our first exposure to her, she might have struck us as 17, but since she was the comparative veteran of five features by then, she seemed older than she was.

So when I saw her in Thor: Love and Thunder this past week, I thought, "Wait, wasn't The Phantom Menace 23 years ago? What excellent plastic surgery has Natalie Portman gotten?"

Well, she may have gotten some -- it's pretty common even for comparatively young "over the hill" Hollywood people -- but it's not because she's actually old. 

And it's not the first time I've had to remind myself how young she still is, having made more than 50 films if you include shorts. I feel like I just checked her age like six months ago. I keep saying "Well she must be at least 45 by now."

Portman's always been ahead of the curve I guess, which is unsurprising for an incredibly smart person who attended Harvard. She was done with one of the biggest trilogies in cinema history, which would define most people's whole careers, by the time she was 24. She won an Oscar when she wasn't yet 30. Just after that she appeared in another major trilogy that has now become a quadrilogy, though she's only appeared in three of the four films. Throughout she has also challenged herself with difficult work from acclaimed directors, such as Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Pablo Larrain and Terrence Malick. Even many of her more genre-oriented choices have represented challenges for her, such as V for Vendetta and Annihilation.

I suppose a lot of these thoughts would be suited for an in memoriam piece, and maybe my mind is still in that place after writing such a piece for James Caan a few days ago. But chances are I will never get to write such a piece for Portman, since she will certainly outlive me. 

And while I'll follow Portman anywhere she goes on screen, I can't say her latest movie, or her in it, really worked for me. If you want to read my negative review of one of my most anticipated movies of 2022, you can find it here.