The actress tied the knot with Benjamin Millepied in 2012.
Natalie Portman is addressing speculation surrounding her marriage. The 42-year-old actress is one of 11 cover stars for Vanity Fair's 30th annual Hollywood issue, and, in her accompanying interview, reacts to rumors about her marriage to Benjamin Millepied.
The couple, who tied the knot in 2012, became the focus of rumors last summer when Millepied's alleged affair with a 25-year-old woman came to light. Shortly thereafter, Portman was spotted without her wedding ring.
As for how Portman feels about all the chatter with regard to her relationship, the May December star tells the outlet, "It's terrible, and I have no desire to contribute to it."
Separating her public and private lives is something Portman has been dealing with her entire career, which began when she was just a child.
"I got very protective of it very early on," she says of protecting her private life. "I chose a different name when I started, which was kind of an interesting way that I separated identities. I would get upset if someone at school called me Natalie Portman. I was like, 'If you know me, you know me as Natalie Hershlag at school.' It was kind of an extreme bifurcation of identity that I've tried to integrate a little bit more as an adult."
"I felt like it was not accepting that both were part of me, that there wasn't a 'real' me and a 'pretend' me, and that they didn't necessarily have different names," Portman continues. "And it's not just two different versions, there are multitudes of ways other people see me, both public and private, and there are multitudes of ways I see myself."
She adds, "Somehow the intersection of all of those are part of me, and it's important to have all of those within me and as me, as opposed to being like, that's some external thing, this is the real thing. As I started having kids and a family, I started realizing that maybe it was not helpful to be like, there's two of me. I have many interactions during my day as a public person. To exclude that from my experience is not real."
RELATED CONTENT:
