oxygenver grateful beef brisket, 20 years of marriage ended. When Maddie Schwartz walked out of her Baltimore home with its new kitchen (“I thought you liked the new kitchen,” her clueless husband said), she was a free woman. In the seven-episode Lady of the Lake, Natalie Portman stars as Maddie, whose childhood ambition to be an investigative reporter is unleashed after she blows up her life and squeezes her way into the city newspaper Baltimore Star News.
This is Portman’s first real foray into television in her 30-year career. From her 12-year-old film debut in “Leon,” to her Oscar-winning turn as a ballerina in “Black Swan,” to blockbusters (“Star Wars'” Padmé Amidala and “Thor” ’s Jane Foster) and smart indie films like “Stolen Hearts,” she never made it to the small screen. Why? “I just don’t have the right projects,” Portman said in a scribbling voice in Los Angeles. “It felt natural because I was excited to explore the character in this format — when you have seven hours, it’s like a playground.”
The series is adapted from Laura Lippman’s 2019 novel, which was inspired by two real-life disappearances in Baltimore in the 1960s. When a young Jewish girl goes missing, the entire city is in trouble and attracts widespread media attention. In contrast, the disappearance of a young black woman, Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), and the subsequent discovery of her body in the lake were reported only by the city’s black newspapers. Maddie, a former high school reporter who found herself a bored housewife in her 30s, became fixated on uncovering Cleo’s death and what, if any, might connect the two disappearances. talk). In doing so, lives are trampled on, or worse, lives are put in danger. So the question is: Who has the right to tell stories?
The material, Portman said, “raises a very interesting topic for me about what happens when oppressed people oppress others. It’s possible to be both the oppressed and the oppressor. Sometimes, when we look for ourselves When we are free, we do not realize that we are trampling on other people’s lives.
Portman said it was “incredible, very creatively fulfilling, but also exhausting. This was one of those shoots a lot of happened. At one point, the police became involved when two men approached the cast and crew, threatening violence and demanding money to continue filming in that area of Baltimore (the production had since moved). The actor suffered a broken collarbone, and several members of the team also contracted the coronavirus, including Portman. Director Alma Har’el — a filmmaker and video artist who is another motivating factor for Portman — “has been incredible through it all; her calm, patient and leading with optimism.
The Baltimore setting has personal meaning for Portman, who was born in Israel and moved to the United States with her parents when she was three, then moved around before the family settled on Long Island. In recent years, she has split her time between Los Angeles and Paris. “I always had the feeling that I had no place,” Portman said. “I’ve always felt disconnected from where my family lives because each generation lives in a different place, so I don’t really have that sense of continuity or belonging.”
Her great-grandparents lived in Baltimore, and for Portman, the show became an exploration of her family’s history. “Around the same time, I was working on a big ancestry project for my mom’s 70th birthday, so I found all these documents, like census records from the 1920s and addresses of my great-grandparents in Baltimore. Those streets they walked . There is a Jewish deli that has been around for 100 years and I can imagine them stepping into it, I have to go there but they are buried [in the city]”.
If the breakdown of Maddie’s marriage bears more similarities to the dissolution of Portman’s own (she and French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she has two children each) finalized their divorce earlier this year , ages 7 and 13 respectively), she doesn’t mean, although it does feel like a new beginning for both parties. If Maddie reinvented herself after marriage through explosive sexuality and ambition, Portman seems to be entering a new phase.
This is the second project for her production company, following 2023’s psychosexual drama May 12 with Julianne Moore. She wanted to direct again (“Now that my kids are grown”)—and in her early 30s, Portman adapted and directed A Tale of Love and Darkness, a film based on Amos Oz’s novel A film based on a memoir set in the early days of the state of Israel. The current situation is off-limits today: “Unfortunately, my feelings about it require more space than we can discuss.”
At least for Maddie, there were limits to marriage and being a dutiful Jewish housewife. “It was a role that she desperately wanted to escape during that time period and within her community,” Portman said. For Maddie and Cleo, liberation “is what ties their stories together,” although Cleo, as a black woman, would question how much they have in common. There’s also the question of how Maddie uses Cleo’s life to fulfill her own desires. “It’s definitely questionable,” Portman said. “You can certainly say she’s a villain.” As a reporter, “there’s an inherent moral issue with whether other people’s lives are her fodder. As a reporter, you’re supposed to be telling a story, not thinking about what if you In doing so, how it might impact that person’s life.
As someone who grew up in public, sometimes under intense scrutiny, Portman has seen it from the other side. She might point out that there is a difference between celebrity gossip and public interest news. The media “plays such an important role in our society, with journalists often risking their lives to tell us what’s going on in places we can’t otherwise reach, but, of course, I’ve never really been a fan of it personally…” She paused. “My job requires me to be trustworthy, so the less people know about me personally the better.” If she had allowed me to ask a personal question – I could almost feel the publicist hearing our conversation feeling ANGRY – A recent photo of her laughing and chatting with actor Paul Mescal outside a London pub has the internet buzzing with rumors. Portman laughed and said they were friends. I said he seemed sweet and suited her well enough that she was smitten. “I’m so in awe of his talent,” she said.
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She’s more comfortable in more serious matters. In Baltimore in the 1960s, as elsewhere in the United States, the relationship between the Jewish and black communities was complicated, Portman said, “very interesting. There were many Jews who participated in civil rights protests; there were Jews who were involved in excluding black citizens from certain outside of these institutions. This mix of cooperation and adversarial relationships is fascinating—two minority groups facing discrimination clearly find some degree of unity in facing similar issues, but then there are differences as well, as Jews can try. Assimilating white people, many of whom do so to survive, makes them part of a group that discriminates against others.
She noted that Portman’s grandfather changed his name from Edelstein to Stevens “so that it would sound less Jewish.” It started as a survival mechanism, but first alienated them. identity of. Anti-Semitism appears shockingly in the show—in one scene, a Jewish cemetery is desecrated with a swastika—and is timely. “Like everyone else, I’ve read disturbing reports of a rising tide of anti-Semitism,” she said. She added that she had not experienced it herself. “But I know it’s happening.”
The show did make Portman think about what has changed for the better, especially for women. Mattie fought her way through the almost all-male newspaper and couldn’t even buy a car without her husband’s signature. “It’s so powerful that we’ve come so far in the 50-plus years since then,” she said. “If it were possible again in the next 50 years that such a big change would happen, what would be possible – that would give hope.” Even during her own career, things had changed. “When I started out, actresses’ careers ended at 40 [Portman is 43]. Right now, I think, our greatest actresses are doing the most interesting work, and they’re in their 60s, 70s, 80s. We do see an interest in women’s whole lives and whole selves. I’m so grateful to the actresses who paved the way for this and refused to disappear.
Why can she survive in an industry that has traditionally been unkind to child actors and young women? “I really think I’m lucky. My parents protected me, I’m lucky not to have had any traumatic experiences, and I’m lucky to have been given the opportunities that I’ve been given. I feel so grateful and I know how great the opportunities are. Her success There’s something delightful about it, and it’s something she deserves, but it also seems to be on her own terms. When the Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace was released, Portman was catapulted to global stardom, starting at Harvard University. pursuing a degree in psychology. After winning an Oscar for “Black Swan,” Portman moved to Europe. “I was lucky enough to be able to work, even though I made choices in my life that were probably unusual for working in Hollywood,” she said. . “But I think at the end of the day, you want to know that you’ve had incredible experiences — and movies can be incredible experiences — but it’s the time with the people you love that’s most important. “
Lady in the Lake is available to stream on Apple TV+ July 19.
