Natalie Portman perches on a stool at the counter of a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan, nibbling on a soy-cheese sandwich and minding her own business. The same cannot be said of her fellow patrons, two of whom grin smugly, imagining they go undetected snapping pictures of her -- still in full makeup from a photo shoot and wrapped in a trench coat -- with their cellphones. Hanging by the counter behind Portman is framed testimony of how often this occurs: A paparazzi shot of the 28-year-old pixie, who is holding a bottle of the restaurant's juice while her dog mistakes her leg for a fire hydrant.
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Natalie Portman is growing through her roles
The 28-year-old actress is choosing parts with an eye on how they'll affect her life. 'I want to be a woman on screen because I want to be a woman in my life. I don't want to be a little girl,' she says.
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Portman's ability to elegantly ignore this kind of attention -- first garnered for her debut in "The Professional" at the age of 12 and reaching mania during the second "Star Wars" trilogy -- is about to be sorely tested. This year, she has a spate of films that any actress her age would be delighted to accumulate over a lifetime. First up on Friday is "New York, I Love You," a series of intertwining short films, one of which Portman wrote and directed, in which a father shepherds a child through the park and is mistaken for a nanny. She also stars in a segment directed by Mira Nair, playing an Orthodox Jew who connects with an Indian jewelry dealer as they exchange cultural stories.
Don Roos' drama "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits," which showed at the Toronto International Film Festival, will follow, and on Dec. 4, she will be seen opposite Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in Jim Sheridan's "Brothers."
And that's just the beginning. Last spring, she filmed the indie "Hesher," which she also produced, then spent the summer in Belfast on her first comedy, the royal fantasy "Your Highness," before returning to New York for four months of filming Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan." Finally, she'll usher in the spring on the Santa Fe, N.M., set of "Thor."
After that, "I will take a nap -- for like, two months," she says with a laugh. "Right now, I'm working probably more than is good for me, but sometimes it's good to exceed your boundaries and stretch yourself."
Despite the disparateness of the projects, they are unified in showing off Portman's newfound comfort as a full-fledged adult.
"Just as what you are feeling in your life affects your acting, what you act in definitely affects what you are feeling in your life," she says with typical thoughtfulness.
