Natalie Portman: Heeb and Vegan

Natalie Portman in New York I Love You

Photo from BangItOut.com (used with permission). Photo credit: Eitan Dvir

It's no great secret that Natalie Portman is a Jewish vegetarian. And it was pretty widely reported that she came out with her own vegan shoe line earlier this year. But about a month ago, Natalie told the world some big news: She went vegan. Here's an excerpt from an article in Marie Claire:

She grabs an energy bar from the display basket and studies the contents of the label. She wonders if the energy bar contains milk. That's Tobey's fault. For the past ten days she's gone from being vegetarian to vegan. "I was around Tobey Maguire in rehearsals [for upcoming film Brothers] and he's vegan and I was, like, this is nice. I'm honest about caring about animals. You know, eggs and milk products, there's a lot of animal discomfort in that, too."

In other news, Natalie has had to deal with some controversy with a couple of her upcoming films. She's going to be in a wonderfully titled film called Kosher Vegetarian, as I noted last month. Following a post about the film on The Jew & The Carrot, "a few more right-leaning readers got bunched up about the very thought of an interfaith relationship portrayed – and therefore somehow validated – on the screen," as The Jew & The Carrot's Leah Koenig wrote on Lilith. Natalie ran into a rather different problem while working on New York I Love You: Her romantic interest in the film, a Hasidic actor, was pressured into leaving the movie by the Hasidic community, which disapproved of his presence in a Hollywood film alongside a woman.

Clarification (12/31/09): The photo caption originally identified the man pictured as Abe Karpen. A comment in response to another post said that he is Eitan Dvir. The original actor quit at one point, and I do not know the name of the man in this photo. I have taken out the references to Abe Karpen in this post and one other.