I have such mixed feelings about Natalie Portman’s THR cover interview. On one side, she’s a pretentious, humorless ass. On the other side… I feel like THR asked her a lot of unnecessary questions about politics, the Jewish people, Israel and Charlie Hebdo and she didn’t really get a chance to show off a lighter side. THR’s justification, I suppose, for their line of questioning is that she’s promoting a film she directed, set and filmed in Israel, and she’s an Israeli-born woman who now lives in France (where anti-Semitic hate crimes are on the rise). The interview is actually pretty epic, so if you’d like to parse every word, go here for the full piece. Some highlights:

On Benjamin Netanyahu: “I’m very much against Netanyahu. Against. I am very, very upset and disappointed that he was re-elected. I find his racist comments horrific. However, I don’t — what I want to make sure is, I don’t want to use my platform [the wrong way]. I feel like there’s some people who become prominent, and then it’s out in the foreign press. You know, sh-t on Israel. I do not. I don’t want to do that.”

Forgiving John Galliano after his anti-Semitic rant: “I don’t see why not to be forgiving to someone who is, I mean, someone who’s trying to change. However, I don’t think those comments are ever OK. I don’t forgive the comments, but … we’ve all done things that we regret.”

Her marriage to Benjamin Millepied: “The disappointments are always in myself, and like, when you’re faced day to day with someone looking at you, it’s like a mirror that you have to yourself, and you can see your own good behavior and bad behavior. And it’s a beautiful challenge to be the best person in the mirror that you can be. I mean, I don’t beat myself up over it, but I’m not always as generous as I feel like I could be.”

Whether she’s nervous about being Jewish in Paris. “Yes, but I’d feel nervous being a black man in this country. I’d feel nervous being a Muslim in many places.”

Living in France now: “I’ve been to Paris so much in my life that I felt [at first] like it’s very similar, and then when you live in a place, you start realizing how culturally different we are, deeply culturally different… in millions of ways. I feel like this country has a lot of religion and a lot of freedom around that; and there, the religion is almost like love. Love and intellectualism is their sort of way. I love that people at dinner want to have a serious conversation — and only a serious conversation. They’ll be upset if you don’t have something interesting happen. I love that my kid wants to go to art museums after school — like, ‘Take me to the Pompidou.’ I love that it’s also not elitist, as it is in New York. You can afford to go to the philharmonic or the opera much more easily because all of it’s subsidized. And there’s a huge culture of cinema there.”

She was in Kenya during the Charlie Hebdo attack: “I went to visit a school that we actually helped build with Dior that was an all-girls school in Kenya, like the first girls’ secondary school in the area. Someone I was with was looking at the news and said, ‘Oh my God! There were just attacks in Paris.’ ” Was she shaken by the killings? She looks at me directly and stops twirling that metal stick. “Listen,” she says. “I’m from Israel.”

Her Best Actress Oscar: “I don’t know where it is. I think it’s in the safe or something. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in a while. I mean, Darren [Aronofsky] actually said to me something when we were in that whole thing that resonated so deeply. I was reading the story of Abraham to my child and talking about, like, not worshipping false idols. And this is literally like gold men. This is lit­er­ally worshipping gold idols — if you worship it. That’s why it’s not displayed on the wall. It’s a false idol.”

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

Her lack of interest in her Oscar is… interesting. Especially given that she hustled SO HARD for that little gold idol back in 2011. She was doing and saying everything she could to win that Oscar. And after she won, we found out that she and the Black Swan team pretty much lied the whole time so Natalie could win. Sarah Leal, the real ballerina/body double in Black Swan, came out after Portman’s win to basically say that it was her (Leal’s) body used in many of the ballet scenes and that Natalie wanted everyone to think that she had become this world-class ballerina in just 18 months. Portman’s Oscar win will always have an asterick beside it (for me) and I can’t believe she went through all of that to diss her Oscar.

Incidentally, in the midst of all of that political discussion, Natalie did briefly discuss the massive clusterwhoops of Jane Got a Gun, where the director and several actors all left the project within a week of the start date. Natalie plays coy with what really happened, saying that she got there “one week before we were supposed to start.” What THR didn’t press her on was the fact that she’s a producer on the film and isn’t it strange that she just showed up a week before the production began and she only had like one meeting with Lynne Ramsay, the director who quit? Isn’t much of the clusterwhoops ON NATALIE for poor management?

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet & WENN.