Natalie Portman is one of the best actresses of her generation, and her Best Actress Academy Award proves it. But even one of the best actresses of her generation is not blessed with all the opportunities that actors are given, she told The Wall Street Journal.

As an example, she said: method acting is when an actor embodies the character they are playing, not only on screen, but off screen as well. (Think of a fully immersive experience where the director yells "cut" and the actor is always in character, rather than switching from playing XYZ character.) Daniel Day-Lewis is an example of a method practitioner.) This is a method of acting that Portman has never employed, and for good reason.

"I've gotten into roles, but I honestly think that's a luxury that women don't have," she told the magazine. I don't think my kids or my partner would understand much that I always have everyone call me 'Jackie Kennedy.'" (Portman is referring to her role as the former first lady in 2016's "Jackie.")

Portman said that being a full method actor is not consistent with her role as a mother (she shares two children with Benjamin Millepied). Don't think Portman doesn't play the part; for her 2010 Oscar-winning role in "Black Swan," she met Millepied, a dancer and choreographer, by chance; according to Variety, for the film she trained as a ballet dancer for months and "was She even changed her diet to only almonds and carrots. But after a day on set, Portman returns to herself, not the character she is embodying at the time.

Portman's comments about actresses and method acting follow recent comments by Carey Mulligan, who had never tried method acting until her recent appearance in Maestro." "There was always a part of me that felt that as an actor, 'Well, I'm not going to be one of those actors who maintains a dialect between takes,'" she told Variety. "There was a part of me that was a little hesitant or nervous about fully committing to something. But that was something that Bradley [Cooper, who directed and starred in the film] basically asked at the beginning of the process. He said, 'If you're going to do this, you have to do it fully and completely.' When he said that, I thought, 'Okay, I'm definitely going to do it all. I'll do all the research. I'm going to do all the dialect stuff. I'm going to do all of it so that when I go on set, I feel like I'm 100 percent onstage and I don't remember what happened."

Cooper, "like other male actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis, Jared Leto, and Jeremy Strong, is famous for staying in character throughout production, employing method acting techniques," reports Variety. Jared Leto's reputation as a method actor is everywhere, so much so that he recently mocked himself while presenting at the 2024 Golden Globe Awards.

Leto told Variety about the process, "I'm not a method actor. And it could be really pretentious. It's my job to come, do the best I can, and over-prepare. And to get results. And it's also my job to like working with them. And to be cooperative and to have a good experience on the set. (13]

Andrew Garfield is also not married and has no children. In Martin Scorsese's "Silence," he abstained from food and sex to play a Jesuit priest. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what method acting is. There are still people who do method acting, and it's not about being a jerk to everyone on set. In reality, it's about living honestly in your imagined situation and at the same time being really nice to your crew, being a normal human being, being able to drop it when you need it and stay there when you want to stay."

This is not to say that only men who are not married and have no children can use this technique, but Portman has a point, and it applies to other industries as well. Having a family and having responsibilities outside of work is great, but everything comes at a price.