Natalie Portman talks Jewish role in upcoming TV show
Israeli actress says ‘Lady of the Lake’ project took on a more personal tone as it is set in Baltimore, where her great-grandparents lived
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Natalie Portman reflected on her latest role as a Jewish housewife turned investigative journalist in the 1960s in an interview published on Friday.
In her first TV role, the Israeli-born actress plays Maddie Schwartz, who tries to solve the disappearances of a Jewish girl and a Black woman in “The Lady in the Lake,” directed by Alma Har’el, who like Portman is Israeli-American.
Portman told The Guardian that this was “a character I felt excited to explore in this form — it’s such a playground when you have seven hours.”
She said what drew her to the project was the exploration of the relationship between the Jewish and black communities in Baltimore as two oppressed minorities.
“It’s very much a topic that’s interesting to me, namely what happens when oppressed people oppress others. It’s possible to be both oppressed and oppressor. And that sometimes when we’re looking for our own freedom, we don’t realize we’re stepping on someone else’s life,” she said.
Expanding on the relationship between the communities, Portman talked about its complexity in the ’60s when many Jews marched with the civil rights movement while others were involved in excluding Black people from certain institutions.
“That combination of collaboration and adversarial relationship is fascinating to explore – two minority groups that face discrimination and obviously found some measure of unity to face similar problems. But then also had differences because Jews could try to assimilate into whiteness, which many of them did as a survival method, making them part of a group that discriminated against others,” she said.
The show is set in Baltimore, where Portman’s great-grandparents lived, giving the project another personal layer for the actress.
“They walked those streets. There’s a Jewish deli that’s been there for 100 years that I could imagine them stepping foot in, that I got to go to, and they’re buried [in the city],” she said.
The interview focused mainly on “The Lady in the Lake” and Portman’s role in it, but the actress did not talk about her own experiences as an Israeli Jew, refusing to discuss how she feels about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and saying that she has not experienced antisemitism, “but I know it is happening.”
The Times of Israel Community.