In Black Swan, Natalie Portman is forever haunted by her double, and why shouldn’t that continue into real life? “Of the full body [dance] shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says her ballerina double Sarah Lane, who claims that Portman has gotten too much credit for the dance scenes where her face was digitally grafted onto Lane’s body. “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff.” Lane tells EW that she was asked to keep quiet so as not to jeopardize the movie’s awards campaign and Portman’s eventual Oscar win: “They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar. It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?” Not to knock Natalie or Sarah, but we think Meryl Streep could probably do that in six weeks while simultaneously learning Mandarin Chinese. Anyway, gauntlet thrown! [EW]
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