Natalie Portman Says She Was “Very Scared” by Childhood Fame, While Drew Barrymore Says She “Lost Everything”

Natalie Portman and Drew Barrymore may have survived childhood stardom, but it certainly wasn’t uncomplicated. This week, in two separate interviews, the Oscar winner and the talk show host opened up about their struggles as former childhood stars, with Portman discussing the “long Lolita phase” she experienced as a child actor, and Barrymore describing growing up in the spotlight as “a real car crash of a life.”

Portman was just 12 years old when she filmed her breakthrough role as Mathilda Lando, the young protégée of a hitman in 1994’s Léon: The Professional. In a conversation with Jenna Ortega for Interview, Portman described her experience being “really sexualized” as a child actor.

“There’s a public understanding of me that’s different from who I am,” Portman, now 43, told Ortega. “I’ve talked about it a little before—about how, as a kid, I was really sexualized, which I think happens to a lot of young girls who are onscreen. I felt very scared by it. Obviously, sexuality is a huge part of being a kid, but I wanted it to be inside of me, not directed towards me.”

Portman, who studied psychology from 1999 to 2003 at Harvard before returning to the entertainment industry, said that she actively tried to project a studious and bookish image to combat the unwanted attention. “I felt like my way of protecting myself was to be, like, ‘I’m so serious. I’m so studious. I’m smart,’ and that’s not the kind of girl you attack,’” she said. “It shouldn’t be a thing, but it worked.”

Portman also shared that she felt that she’s had to navigate various “tropes” as an actress to avoid being pigeonholed. “At each phase in my career, there was a different one that I was, like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to avoid this,’” she told Ortega, whom she stars opposite in the forthcoming film, The Gallerist. “Obviously, there was a long Lolita phase. Then, there was the long ‘chick who helps the guy realize his emotional thing’ phase for about a decade… There’s a lot of the same tropes.”

While Portman discussed navigating unwanted sexual attention as a child actor, Barrymore recalled her experience of trying to survive a tumultuous childhood in the spotlight. Born into a historic acting family, Barrymore cemented her place in the family business with her scene-stealing performance in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-terrestrial as a seven-year-old. After the role launched her into stardom, Barrymore’s childhood was marked by turbulence, with Barrymore spending 18 months in a rehabilitation facility for drug and alcohol addiction when she was 13.

“When I was 13, I truly lost everything. From my own doing,” she said on Wednesday’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show. While she didn’t go into specifics, she described how difficult growing up in the public eye was. “I was never unprofessional, but I had a real car crash of a life, and I genuinely… Nobody wanted to work with me,” she said. “And I understood why, and I took responsibility for myself, but it was a great lesson.”

While both Portman and Barrymore had their ups and downs as child actors, they both have taken lessons from the experience. Although she describes herself as being “stupid and silly” among friends, Portman says that she learned early on to keep her private life private. “I’m not a particularly private person in real life—I’ll tell you anything—but in public, it was so clear early on that, if you tell people how private you are, your privacy gets respected a lot more,” she said. “I set up a little bit of a barrier to be, like, ‘I’m not going to do photo shoots with my kids.’”

Barrymore’s large takeaway? “To always be grateful.”