Natalie Portman, who turns 21 this summer, was 15 when she started work on her first Star Wars movie. Since then, she's spent the past three years studying at an Ivy League university, starred in the movies Anywhere But Here and Where the Heart Is, performed with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in Chekov's The Seagull at New York's Public Theater, and adorned the covers of numerous magazines, becoming recognized the world over as one of America's finest young actresses. For her next film, the dark comedy The Bride Wore Black, Portman begins making the transition into more mature roles.
Indeed, Portman said that her biggest challenge for Episode II was making Padmé seem 10 years older than she was in Episode I, even though Natalie herself had aged only three years. "George told me that the struggle for this one is to make me seem older," Portman said. "He's been working with me on that. He wants to make sure I seem older than Anakin, so it's believable that I can be bossing him around, and he's a little intimidated. She looks at him as a little boy--at least for the first half of the film."
It's in the second half the film that Anakin's return to her life stirs feelings in Padmé that prove hard to ignore. "There's a scene where Anakin and I are finishing dinner, and he uses his Jedi powers to make the fruit fly, which scares me a little, but it turns into a flirting tactic," she recalled. "I don't think George was satisfied with the dialogue he had written, because he told Hayden and me to just improvise--which was amusing, because it got inappropriate very quickly. It was a fun scene to shoot, although we felt pretty stupid biting fruit which didn't exist out of the air."
"There's one we call the leather-and-lace outfit," Natalie said, "which is for when Anakin and I have dinner for the first time. It's this very tight corset, with these gloves, and it's beautiful. There are a lot of corsets that are very tight, which I'm sure everyone will notice. I didn't really believe it until I wore it. That's what's different about the costumes in Episode II as opposed to Episode I--whereas Episode I was queenly, it was still made for a young girl. Now I'm supposed to be a woman, so we've got a lot of midriff, and a lot of tight corsets."
