Natalie Portman she still gets treated like kid on film sets even 30 years after her debut as child artiste
Published on May 29, 2025
By IANS
- LOS ANGELES — Hollywood actress Natalie Portman, who made her debut with
‘Leon: The Professional’, has an illustrious career of 30 years behind her.
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- But the actress shared that people still "treat her
like a child”, reports ‘Female First UK’.
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- The 43-year-old actress, who rose to fame as a child in
1999's 'Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace', insisted that despite
growing up in the spotlight and developing a "serious persona" to
combat people's perceptions of her, she is still fighting against it.
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- As per ‘Female First UK’, during a conversation about
Jenna Ortega, Natalie told ‘Harper's Bazaar’ magazine, “We’re both physically
tiny, so people will often treat you like a child forever. I’m 43 now, and
people kind of pat me on the head. I don’t look like a child, but I often feel
like I’m treated like a kid”.
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- She further mentioned, “Child actors often cultivate a
serious persona because otherwise they’ll get treated like kids forever. When
you start working as a kid, you kind of always feel like a kid in the
workplace. Having some of that seriousness helps remind people, ‘I’m a
grown-up’. Natalie and Jenna have worked together in new comedy thriller 'The
Gallerist', and the 'Fountain of Youth' actress noticed they have a similar
process in between takes”.
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- She explained that they don’t sit in a chair, they just
kind of squat in the corner. “Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was also a child
actress, said she did it too, that it’s a way of grounding yourself. There’d be
all these chairs, but we’d just squat and look at each other and be like, ‘Wow,
this is weird’”, she added.
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- Meanwhile, Jenna opened up on how much it's helped her
become friends with the likes of Natalie, Winona Ryder and Natasha Lyonne, who
all understand the journey she's on.
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- She said, “It’s been so beneficial and so cozy. They’ve
seen it all, and, honestly, during a much darker time in Hollywood. We’ve all
got this jaded way about us that I don’t think we’d have if we hadn’t started
so young and had so many brutal realisations and experiences. But they turned
out all right”.
