Natalie Portman on Thor's Hammer, Wielding Her Own Power and Returning to the MCU

It wasn’t just that Natalie Portman packed on so much muscle she could arm-wrestle Captain America. It’s that she’d never been asked to do it before.
Throughout her 30-year career, Portman has grown accustomed to exploiting her lean five-foot-three frame, most memorably in her Oscar-winning performance as an obsessive, spindle-thin ballet dancer in 2010’s “Black Swan.” As the brilliant astrophysicist Jane Foster in 2011’s “Thor” and 2013’s “Thor: The Dark World,” she spends much of her screen time in varying states of dewy-eyed peril or with her head craned at a substantial angle to pine after Chris Hemsworth’s towering Asgardian warrior.
When Portman returns as Jane on July 8 in director Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Love and Thunder,” however, the 41-year-old will not only be playing a superhero in her own right - the Mighty Thor, Jane’s persona once she comes into possession of the mystical hammer Mjolnir - but one who can stand toe-to-toe, and nearly eye-to-eye, with Hemsworth’s Thor.
“On ‘Black Swan,’ I was asked to get as small as possible,” Portman says on a recent morning over a two-hour breakfast. “Here, I was asked to get as big as possible. That’s an amazing challenge - and also state of mind as a woman.”
Natalie Portman Variety Cover
While female superheroes have finally started to populate across film and television - from Captain Marvel to Ms. Marvel - it’s still quite uncommon for the women playing them to be asked to put on the brawn that’s compulsory for their male counterparts. But starting in the fall of 2020, Portman worked with a trainer over 10 months before and during filming to rebuild her physique, especially her shoulders and arms, into ripped, comic book shape. Between leaked photos from the “Love and Thunder” set in Australia in 2021 and the film’s trailers this past spring, the internet has lost its collective mind that Portman, who was just 16 when she was cast as Queen Amidala in “Star Wars,” could get so stacked. The experience was revelatory for her.
“To have this reaction and be seen as big, you realize, ‘Oh, this must be so different, to walk through the world like this,’” Portman says. “When you’re small - and also, I think, because I started as a kid - a lot of times I feel young or little or, like, a pat-on-the-head kind of person. And I present myself that way, too, because of that.”
Seated at a quiet waterfront restaurant in Baltimore, where she’s shooting the limited series “Lady in the Lake” for Apple TV+, Portman often folds her arms (now back to human scale) inside the sleeves of an oversize T-shirt, which has the odd effect of accentuating her petite proportions. If anything, though, she has spent the past three years learning just how much space she can take up in the world: In addition to an on-screen superhero, she’s a full-time producer and the co-founder of Angel City Football Club, the women’s soccer team based in Los Angeles that launched its inaugural season in April. Each of these endeavors has also been driven by Portman’s desire to center the national reckonings over sex, gender and race of the past five years in her work, from diversifying crews to pushing for pay equity.
“Natalie’s the kind of person who would call another female castmate and have transparency around what she’s making so that she can help someone also advocate for herself,” says “Love and Thunder” co-star Tessa Thompson, who began working closely with Portman in 2018 as a fellow co-founder of Time’s Up. “That’s like real-world superhero shit that I have seen Natalie do time and time again.”
Another unexpected benefit for Portman to embracing her newfound sense of size has been watching others around her have to contend with it. Quite literally on “Love and Thunder”: Jane’s Mighty Thor stands six feet tall, and since there’s no healthy way yet for an actor to grow nearly 10 inches, the crew had to get creative to bring Portman to the proper height for scenes in which she walked with her co-stars.
“We’d rehearse the scene, they’d see the path, and then they’d build a path that was like one foot off the ground or whatever, and I would just walk on that,” Portman says, her eyes lighting up at the memory.
Thompson laughs at just the mention of the process. “They would call it a deck, but depending on the accent, sometimes it sounded like something else,” she recalls. “Because we’re all children.”
“It was actually one of our running jokes,” Portman says before leaping up from her chair with a wild grin to demonstrate what would happen when Hemsworth had to cross over the deck. “Chris would have to …” she says before attempting to take a wide step while keeping her head level. She dissolves into giggles: “They’d all have to navigate my deck!”