Returning to the Marvel Universe after almost a decade away – save for a brief, cutting-room-floor-rescued scene in Avengers: Endgame – Natalie Portman discusses bulking up for the role of The Mighty Thor as Jane Foster takes the mantle and Mjolnir alongside Chris Hemsworth’s Thor Odinson under director Taika Waititi in Thor: Love and Thunder, talking life, career and of course her time in the Star Wars galaxy which saw the prequels slammed by critics of the time but now reappraised far more generously.
Whether Portman would return to the MCU was much less clear for her. She’d been keeping up with all the movies — “I have a 10-year-old boy,” she explains — so she knew that Jane still existed somewhere. But she “didn’t really know” whether she would ever come back, especially after 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok,” also directed by Waititi, excluded her character altogether. “They don’t often make more than three films in a series,” she says with a shrug.
One factor, however, that did not affect Portman’s feelings: the tricky matter that “The Dark World” has been widely regarded as one of the worst films in the MCU. “I mean, I had it with ‘The Professional’ too,” she says of the 1994 Luc Besson thriller that was her feature debut. “It was slaughtered critically, and now, despite having been in Marvel and ‘Star Wars’ movies, it’s the main thing people come up to me about. That and ‘Star Wars’ are two examples of things that when they came out, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is a disaster.’ And then 20 years later — actually, 30 years later for ‘The Professional’ — it’s beloved.”
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