Natalie Portman had already made several movies when she took on the role of Padmé Amidala. But The Phantom Menace was the first new chapter in the main Star Wars saga since Return of the Jedi, and its 1999 release drew a level of attention she’d never experienced before. In an October 26 interview, Portman looked back on what it felt like to be a teenager at the center of that reaction.
Portman Kept Quiet About How Much the Criticism Hurt
In her Harper’s Bazaar cover interview, Portman said she now feels lucky to have experienced failure early, especially because she’s had successes to balance it out. She brought up her first movie, Léon: The Professional, before turning to Star Wars. She was 16 when she made The Phantom Menace and remembers the film getting “murdered” despite its financial success.
What stuck with her was how sweeping the criticism felt. She remembers hearing that the movie had ruined the franchise and that the cast couldn’t act. Looking back, she called it “an amazing early lesson in how to read really bad things about yourself.” Her instinct was to make another movie. “I’m going to show them,” she recalled thinking.
Privately, the criticism hurt. Portman said she couldn’t remember talking to anyone about it at the time. She wanted to keep that hurt to herself, even as she was deciding what to do next.
The Phantom Menace Sold Tickets While Critics Argued Over It
The Phantom Menace earned about $924 million worldwide in its original release. The reviews tell a more complicated story. The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan found the movie slow and short on warmth, while Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars and praised George Lucas’s visual imagination.
Portman has also talked about what she was trying to do with the role. In a 2018 Vanity Fair video, she remembered seeing Kabuki theater in Japan and thinking of it again when she saw the costume drawings for Queen Amidala. She tried to bring some of that slow, stylized movement to the performance. Looking back, she laughed about whether anyone had picked up on it. “You’re paying attention to the spaceships,” she said.
Mike Nichols Helped Her Get Another Shot
Portman had already spoken about the professional fallout in a 2014 tribute to director Mike Nichols. “I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me,” she recalled at the time. She credited Nichols with writing to director Anthony Minghella to recommend her for Cold Mountain, which came out in 2003 while the prequel trilogy was still underway.
Nichols went on to direct Portman in Closer. In 2005, six years after the reviews she remembers reading as a teenager, she received her first Oscar nomination for that performance. A few months later, she was back on the big screen as Padmé in Revenge of the Sith.