Natalie Portman hit the ground running as an actress when she portrayed Mathilda — the 12-year-old runaway who lives with a hitman in Luc Besson’s “Leon: The Professional.”
After high school she went to Harvard University while she filmed “Star Wars: Episodes I and II” and has since been nominated for three Academy Awards and finally won one for her performance in Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.”
And one famous musician claimed that he dated Natalie Portman and then she did the unexpected.
Richard Melville Hall, or otherwise popularly known as Moby, was one of America’s most famous underground DJ producers and remixers of the 1990s. But he didn’t find commercial success until his fifth album “Play” debuted in 1999 and it became an unexpected global hit selling 12 million copies.
1999 was also the year that Moby claimed to date young actress Natalie Portman in his new memoir where he wrote, “I was a bald binge drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me. I was 33 and she was 20 but this was her world.”
But the thing is she wasn’t actually 20; Portman was 18 and just graduated high school.
When Portman discovered what he wrote she set the record straight and denied ever dating the famous DJ.
The “Closer” actress told the Outlet, “I was surprised to hear that he characterized the very short time that I knew him as dating because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school. I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated. When we met after the show, he said, ‘Let’s be friends.’ He was on tour and I was working shooting a film, so we only hung out a handful of times before I realized that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”
It sounds like he was indulging in older man predatory behavior and he was delusional that he thought she was into him in any kind of sexual way.
Moby even claimed that “he tried to be her boyfriend,” in the same memoir so he already, probably unintentionally, contradicted his own claim. You don’t “try” to date somebody who’s into you. You’re either dating or you’re not and it looks like she wasn’t interested.
Moby responded on Twitter, “I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date. And after briefly dating in 1999 we remained friends for years. I like Natalie, and I respect her intelligence and activism. But, to be honest, I can’t figure out why she would actively misrepresent the truth about our(albeit brief)involvement. The story as laid out in my book Then It Fell Apart is accurate, with lots of corroborating photo evidence, etc.”
Along with the post, Moby shared a picture of the two of them where he’s got a wide cheesy grin with his shirt off putting his arm around Portman. And her face certainly says it all because she seems incredibly uncomfortable either with his arm around her or that she didn’t want to pose for the picture.
Moby concluded his post with, “Ps I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me(to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too), but it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history.”
One possibility that Portman denied the extent of their relationship could be because she was annoyed he would gossip about it in his new memoir, which makes it ironic he called the Portman interview a “gossip piece.”
There are too many inconsistencies with Moby’s claim and it’s likely he just said that to sell more copies of his memoir.