'Good Sex' a 'Total Reset' of Natalie Portman's Career (EXCL)
Natalie Portman is teaming up with Lena Dunham for a raunchy new romcom, Good Sex, and she’s excited to be embracing her sultry side post-divorce from Benjamin Millepied in March 2024, while giving herself a career makeover off-screen, too.
“Is it risky to get into business with Lena Dunham at a time when Lena is not the most beloved or celebrated figure in Hollywood? Sure, and Natalie knows it,” a longtime pal of the 43 year-old actress exclusively tells Life & Style. “Is Natalie rolling the dice a little with this thing? Yeah, but there’s also a huge financial upside for her if people like the movie,” the source adds, noting because it is being independently financed, the V for Vendetta actress, 43, has rights to a pretty sizable piece of the pie if it turns out to be a success.
“This kind of move has paid off for her before, like when she made Black Swan 15 years ago and it became a massive worldwide box office hit,” the insider explains.
Good Sex kicked off an intense bidding war between some of the industry’s biggest players, including Warner Bros., Amazon, Apple and the ultimate victor — Netflix, with a reported $55 million sale.
The synopsis for the upcoming project reads: “After spending a decade in a failed relationship, successful couples’ therapist Ally (Portman) is turning 40 and is pushed, kicking and screaming, by her best friend back into the hopeless New York dating scene. But Ally finds her life pulled in opposing directions as she falls into a steamy fling with a 20-something Brooklyn hipster just as she begins a promising, more conventional relationship with Alan, a successful 50-something in Manhattan. As a romantic crossroads blossoms into a full-blown identity crisis, Ally juggles to keep these two very different men separate and to make sense of her own conflicting desires before she risks losing them both.”
Given the recent success of several other age-gap relationship-focused movies, like Natalie’s May December, Nicole Kidman’s Babygirl and Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, the Star Wars actress is banking on studio execs seeing her potential in her new flick as not just a pretty supporting actress but a performer with real substance.
“Once again, Natalie is going to make a very sexually explicit R-rated movie, but she’s doing it for the right reasons and, at the moment, she’s backing Lena’s vision with everything she has,” the source continues. The Black Swan star expressed her admiration for Lena’s filmmaking, praising her 2010 film Tiny Furniture as “just amazing” in an interview with Vogue, adding the Girls actress’ confidence helped her confront sexism in Hollywood, too. “She’s the subject, she’s not the object, and it’s beautiful — that’s the kind of thing we need more of.”
The source notes Natalie’s eagerness to collaborate with Lena is part of a broader plan to reinvent herself within the industry. “This project is becoming a cornerstone in the total reset Natalie is doing around her career. She wants to do uncompromising projects that get attention all over the world, and she seems to have picked a winner with Good Sex.”