Natalie Portman Breaks Silence on Cheating Rumors About Husband Benjamin Millepied

Natalie Portman has no interest in fanning the flames of rumors about her marriage to dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied.

News outlets reported last summer that Millepied had allegedly engaged in an affair with Camille Étienne, a 25-year-old climate activist. Since, Portman and Millepied have barely acknowledged the rumors, though both have been photographed in public without their wedding rings.

In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Portman voiced her distaste for the public interest in her personal life.

“It’s terrible, and I have no desire to contribute to it,” she said.

She also opened up about valuing privacy as a public figure.

“I got very protective of it very early on,” she explained. “I chose a different name when I started, which was kind of an interesting way that I separated identities. I would get upset if someone at school called me Natalie Portman. I was like, if you know me, you know me as Natalie Hershlag at school. It was kind of an extreme bifurcation of identity that I’ve tried to integrate a little bit more as an adult.”

These dual identities of her stage name and her real name presented an internal struggle to the actor. “I felt like it was not accepting that both were part of me, that there wasn’t a ‘real’ me and a ‘pretend’ me, and that they didn’t necessarily have different names,” she continued. “And it’s not just two different versions, there are multitudes of ways other people see me, both public and private, and there are multitudes of ways I see myself. Somehow the intersection of all of those are part of me, and it’s important to have all of those within me and as me, as opposed to being like, that’s some external thing, this is the real thing.”

Her mindset began to change when she and Millepied, who she married in 2012, welcomed their two children: Aleph, 12, and Amalia, 6.

“As I started having kids and a family, I started realizing that maybe it was not helpful to be like, there’s two of me,” she said. “I have many interactions during my day as a public person. To exclude that from my experience is not real.”

As an associate editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com, Chelsey keeps a finger on the pulse on all things celeb news. She also writes on social movements, connecting with activists leading the fight on workers’ rights, climate justice, and more. Offline, she’s probably spending too much time on TikTok, rewatching Emma (the 2020 version, of course), or buying yet another corset.