‘I think when someone as famous as Natalie Portman is playing someone as well known as Jackie Kennedy, the question is how long will it take before the audience stops seeing the personalities and only the character?”
That was the uncertainty director Pablo Larraín faced when he cast Portman in the title role in Jackie, his film about the life of the former first lady of the United States, after the assassination of her husband.
His decision has been vindicated. Such is the quality of Portman's performance as Jackie Kennedy in the film – which has its regional premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival on Saturday – that she is tipped to receive her second Best Actress Oscar next year, after winning in 2011 for her role in Black Swan.
The 35-year-old says the thought of playing the wife of president John F Kennedy was terrifying “because I never really thought of myself as a great imitator. I was just trying to get to something that people could believe that I was Jackie”.
It is the first time in a long, distinguished career – which began as a 13-year-old in Luc Besson's hit-man drama Leon – that Portman has played a such a familiar, real-life character.
“Everyone knows what she looks like, sounded like, and has kind of an idea about her,” she says.
Chilean director Larraín was not interested in making a straightforward biopic. Indeed, he is making a name for himself as a specialist in making surprising, intelligent, elliptical biographies.
He also directed Neruda, also getting its regional premiere at Diff, which combined fantasy elements with real-life moments from the life of renowned South American poet Pablo Neruda.
Jackie, Larraín's first English-language film, is set mostly in the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and revolves around the first interview that she gave after his death. It was with Theodore H White (played by Billy Crudup) of Life magazine, and took place at her house in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
As Jackie speaks, the action jumps back and forth in time as we see her conducting tours of the White House, sitting next to her husband when he was shot, at his funeral, and talking to a priest, Richard McSorley (John Hurt).
“It’s so many things at once that she is dealing with,” says Portman.
“The loss of a loved one always leads to a questioning of faith. Everything comes into question, but it happens in such a sudden and violent and traumatic way that it’s shocking.
“Those kind of questions come up so suddenly, when the day before the biggest question of the day was what colour the wallpaper was.”
Portman says she is thankful she has never had to deal with such a traumatic, shocking event, but that she could identify with Kennedy, especially in terms of balancing a public persona with the private.
“The interesting thing that I can relate to, and I think most humans can, on some level, is: ‘How does the world see you? How do you want the world to see you?’ Which everyone has whether you’re public or not,” she says. “And then who you really are, who you want to be personally, privately. So it creates many different selves and that’s something that I hope we capture in the film.”
The result is a fascinating film that cleverly evokes the Camelot image of the Kennedys, and sheds light on how Jackie coped with the death of her husband, while foreshadowing her marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
“I think the movie shows how much she created herself and how she wasn’t defined by Kennedy in the end,” says Portman. “In fact, she defined him.”
• Jackie screens at Vox Cinemas, Mall of the Emirates, at 6.15pm on Saturday and 9.30pm on Wednesday. Neruda screens at the same venue at 3.15pm today and 2.45pm on Friday (December 9). All shows are sold out but standby tickets might be available at 8am on the day of the screening
artslife@thenational.ae