Over Thanksgiving brisket, 20 years of marriage ends. Maddie Schwartz walks out of her Baltimore home, with its new kitchen (“I thought you liked the new kitchen,” says her clueless husband), a free woman. In the seven-part Lady in the Lake, Natalie Portman plays Maddie, whose childhood ambition to be an investigative journalist is unleashed after she explodes her own life – and hustles on to the city paper, the Baltimore Star.
It is Portman’s first real venture into television in a career that has spanned 30 years. From her film debut as a 12-year-old in Leon to her Oscar-winning ballet dancer in Black Swan, blockbusters (Star Wars’ Padmé Amidala and Thor’s Jane Foster) and intelligent indies such as Closer, she’s never been on the small screen. Why? “I just didn’t have the right project,” says Portman over a scratchy line from LA. “This felt natural because it was a character I felt excited to explore in this form – it’s such a playground when you have seven hours.”
The series is based on the 2019 novel by Laura Lippman, which was inspired by two real-life disappearances in Baltimore in the 1960s. When a young Jewish girl goes missing, it grips the city and draws a lot of media attention. In contrast, the disappearance of a young Black woman, Cleo Johnson (played by Moses Ingram), then the discovery of her body in the lake, is only reported by the city’s Black newspaper. Maddie, who had been a high-school journalist but found herself in her 30s a bored housewife, becomes fixated with uncovering how Cleo died and what, if anything, might link the two disappearances. In doing so, lives get trampled on or, worse, put in danger. Then the question: who has the right to tell a story?
The material, says Portman, “is very much a topic that’s interesting to me, namely what happens when oppressed people oppress others. It’s possible to be both oppressed and oppressor. And that sometimes when we’re looking for our own freedom, we don’t realise we’re stepping on someone else’s life.”
It was, Portman says, “incredible and very creatively fulfilling, and also exhausting. It was one of those shoots where a lot of stuff happened.” At one point, police got involved after two men approached the cast and crew, threatening violence and demanding money to continue to film in that area of Baltimore (the production moved). One actor broke his collarbone, and several members of the team went down with Covid, Portman included. The director Alma Har’el – the filmmaker and video artist, another motivating factor for Portman – was “incredible through it all; she led with calmness, patience and optimism.”
The Baltimore setting took on a personal dimension for Portman, who was born in Israel and moved to the US with her parents when she was three, then moved around before the family settled in Long Island. In more recent years, she has split her life between Los Angeles and Paris. “I always have a feeling that I have no place,” says Portman. “I’ve always felt disconnected from the places my family has lived, because every generation has been in a different place, so I don’t really have that continuity or feeling of belonging.”
Her great-grandparents lived in Baltimore, and for Portman this show became an exploration of her family’s history. “Around the same time, I was preparing a big ancestry project for my mom’s 70th birthday so I was finding all these documents, like census records from the 1920s and my great-grandparents’ address in Baltimore. They walked those streets. There’s a Jewish deli that’s been there for 100 years that I could imagine them stepping foot in, that I got to go to, and they’re buried [in the city].”
If there are more parallels in the collapse of Maddie’s marriage and the dissolution of Portman’s own marriage (she and the French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she has two children aged seven and 13, finalised their divorce earlier this year), she’s not saying, though there does feel like something of the fresh start for both. If Maddie reinvents herself post-marriage, with explosive sex and wild ambition, so Portman seems to be stepping into a new phase.
This is her production company’s second project, following her 2023 psychosexual movie May December with Julianne Moore. She would like to direct again (“now that my kids are older”) – in her early 30s, Portman adapted and directed A Tale of Love and Darkness, a film based on Amos Oz’s memoir set during the first years of the state of Israel. The current situation is a no-go area today: “How I feel about it requires a lot more space than we have to discuss, unfortunately.”
For Maddie at least, marriage and being the dutiful Jewish housewife was confining. “In that period and her community, that role is very much something she wanted freedom from,” says Portman. Liberation – for Maddie, and for Cleo – “is something that unites their stories”, though Cleo, as a Black woman, would question how much they have in common. And there are issues about the way Maddie uses Cleo’s life to further her own aspirations. “It’s definitely questionable,” says Portman. “You could certainly make an argument that she’s a villain.” As a journalist, “other people’s lives are her material, and there’s a question whether that’s inherently morally problematic. You’re supposed to, as a journalist, tell a story – not be thinking about how it might affect that person’s life if you do.”
As someone who essentially grew up in public, at times under huge scrutiny, Portman has seen it from the other side. There is a difference, she might point out, between celebrity gossip and public interest journalism. The media “has such an important role in our society, and so often journalists are risking their lives to tell us what is going on in places we don’t have access to otherwise, but, of course, personally I’ve never really loved … ” She pauses. “My work demands me to be believable, so the less people know about me personally the better.” If she’ll allow me one personal question – I can almost feel the publicist listening to our conversation bristle – the recent photographs of her laughing and chatting to the actor Paul Mescal outside a London pub set the internet alight with rumours. Portman laughs and says they’re friends. He looked sweetly, and suitably, starstruck by her, I say. “I’m very in awe of his talent,” she says.
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She is more comfortable on more serious matters. In 60s Baltimore, as elsewhere in the US, the relationship between the Jewish and Black communities was complex and, says Portman, “super-interesting. There were many Jews who marched with the civil rights protests; there were also Jews involved in excluding Black citizens from certain institutions. That combination of collaboration and adversarial relationship is fascinating to explore – two minority groups that face discrimination and obviously found some measure of unity to face similar problems. But then also had differences because Jews could try to assimilate into whiteness, which many of them did as a survival method, making them part of a group that discriminated against others.”
Portman’s grandfather, she points out, changed his name from Edelstein to Stevens “to sound less Jewish. That was initially a survival mechanism, but one that took them, first of all, away from their own identity.” Antisemitism is alarmingly present in the series – in one scene, a Jewish cemetery is desecrated with swastikas – and timely. “I read, like everyone else does, about the rising tide of antisemitism which is disconcerting,” she says. She hasn’t experienced it herself, she adds. “But I know it is happening.”
The show did make Portman think about what has changed for the better, particularly for women. Maddie battles her way on to the virtually all-male newspaper, and isn’t even able to buy a car without a husband’s signature. “How powerful it is that we’ve made such strides in the 50 years or so since then,” she says. “What could be possible, if that much change is possible again, in the next 50 years – it gives hope.” Even within the span of her own career, things have changed. “When I was starting out, actresses’ careers were over when they were 40 [Portman is 43]. Now, our greatest actresses who are doing the most interesting work, I feel, are in their 60s, 70s, 80s. We’re really seeing interest in a woman’s whole life and whole self. I’m so grateful to the actresses who are paving the way for that, and are refusing to disappear.”
Why has she’s survived in an industry that hasn’t traditionally been kind to child actors and young women? “I really think I was lucky. My parents protected me and I was lucky not to have any traumatic experiences, and I was lucky to get the opportunities I got. I feel a lot of gratitude and I know how much is chance.” There is something pleasing about her success, well earned but also seemingly on her own terms. When the Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace came out, catapulting Portman to global stardom, she started a psychology degree at Harvard. After winning the Oscar for Black Swan, Portman moved to Europe. “I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to work, despite making choices in my life that might have been unconventional for working in Hollywood,” she says. “But I think, ultimately, you want to know you’ve had incredible experiences – and films can be incredible experiences – but the time with people you love is where everything matters.”
Lady in the Lake is on Apple TV+ from 19 July.