Mighty Natalie Portman: How She Emerged From the Marvel Sidelines to Wield Thor’s Hammer

variety.com:

Natalie Portman packed on so much muscle she could arm-wrestle Captain America. It’s that she’d never been asked to do it before.Throughout her 30-year career, Portman has grown accustomed to exploiting her lean five-foot-three frame, most memorably in her Oscar-winning performance as an obsessive, spindle-thin ballet dancer in 2010’s “Black Swan.” As the brilliant astrophysicist Jane Foster in 2011’s “Thor” and 2013’s “Thor: The Dark World,” she spends much of her screen time in varying states of dewy-eyed peril or with her head craned at a substantial angle to pine after Chris Hemsworth’s towering Asgardian warrior.When Portman returns as Jane on July 8 in director Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Love and Thunder,” however, the 41-year-old will not only be playing a superhero in her own right — the Mighty Thor, Jane’s persona once she comes into possession of the mystical hammer Mjolnir — but one who can stand toe-to-toe, and nearly eye-to-eye, with Hemsworth’s Thor. “On ‘Black Swan,’ I was asked to get as small as possible,” Portman says on a recent morning over a two-hour breakfast. “Here, I was asked to get as big as possible.

That’s an amazing challenge — and also state of mind as a woman.”While female superheroes have finally started to populate across film and television — from Captain Marvel to Ms.

Marvel — it’s still quite uncommon for the women playing them to be asked to put on the brawn that’s compulsory for their male counterparts.

But starting in the fall of 2020, Portman worked with a trainer over 10 months before and during filming to rebuild her physique, especially her shoulders and arms, into ripped, comic book shape.