Natalie Portman just said some awesome things about being a lady boss
One of our fave actresses Natalie Portman has been on quite a roll lately. She was recently cast as our favorite Supreme Court Justice The Notorious RBG Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her directorial debut “A Tale of Love and Darkness” just debuted at Cannes, and this weekend she went on record saying some pretty awesome stuff about being a lady boss.
When it came to directing her feature film, Portman admitted she was afraid she would be judged harshly as an actress helming her own starring vehicle .
“I was afraid of appearing vain,” Portman explained to The Guardian. “I remember as a kid reading about Barbra Streisand directing herself in movies, and people would write that they were just vanity projects. But then I realized that was something they would never say about men directing themselves.”
Gender equality in Hollywood has been a hot button issue as of late, and Portman has been inspired by “women, younger women than I am, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, Brit Marling, just creating their own things” and she, in fact, “teared up” when she saw Lena Dunham’s writing-directing-acting triple credit pop up onscreen during Dunham’s breakout film “Tiny Furniture.”
Portman is thrilled to see women in Hollywood bulldozing down barriers and taking charge to make art, despite any worries they may harbor. “It’s a very female thing of being afraid to say: ‘I’m the boss, and this is how I want it,’” she confessed to the Guardian.
We have always counted on Portman to be smart, observant, and truthful when it comes to talking about feminism. In 2013, she spoke in Elle UK about how feminism in Hollywood needs to be about so much more than women “kicking ass.”
“I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible,” she explained. “I want women and men to be able to be full-time parents or full-time working people or any combination of the two. I want both to be able to do whatever they want sexually without being called names. I want them to be allowed to be weak and strong and happy and sad — human, basically. The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a ‘feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho. A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with.”
Portman is a woman of her words, and is promoting feminism both in front of and behind the camera, our kind of lady.
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