Natalie Portman was asked to ‘get as big as possible’ for ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’

nypost.com:

“Thor: Love and Thunder.”The 41-year-old wields the magical hammer Mjolnir and embodies the superhero, the Mighty Thor, for the fourth installment of the franchise.Portman recently revealed that production told her to gain weight for the transformative role.“On ‘Black Swan,’ I was asked to get as small as possible,” the Oscar winner explained to Variety. “Here, I was asked to get as big as possible.

That’s an amazing challenge — and also state of mind as a woman.”The Israeli-born starlet worked with a personal trainer for more than 10 months before and during filming starting in fall 2020 to revamp her body.The “Garden State” actress rebuilt her shoulders and arms and turned them into muscle.“To have this reaction and be seen as big, you realize, ‘Oh, this must be so different, to walk through the world like this,’” she said.

Portman added, “When you’re small — and also, I think, because I started as a kid — a lot of times I feel young or little or, like, a pat-on-the-head kind of person.

And I present myself that way, too, because of that.”“I mean, it’s always amazing to see yourself, even if only for a split second, in a Marvel film, because you’re in places that you’ve never actually been before,” she told the outlet. “It’s like seeing photos from a vacation that you never took or something.”She also noted how the bad reviews for 2013’s “Thor: The Dark World” didn’t phase her.“I mean, I had it with ‘The Professional’ too,” the mother of two divulged of her 1994 film launch. “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.