25 Celebrities Who Don’t Use Their Real Names: Blake Lively, Lana Del Rey, Nicolas Cage and More

Natalie Portman chose the moniker to protect her privacy, so she used her grandmother’s surname, Portman. However, her classmates in school upset her when she was younger when they began calling her using her stage name.

“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,” she told Vanity Fair.

Portman added, “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. 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.”