Natalie Portman was on Jimmy Kimmel Live and the host asked if her five-year-old son had seen her in Star Wars. It turns out she has a pretty good reason for not showing her children the prequel trilogy, and it has nothing to do with Anakin’s terrible “I hate sand” speech.
Here’s the clip:
And here’s her answer in full:
He has not, he knows about it of course. It’s kind of a shame. You know, when I made it, I was like, ‘This is going to be the coolest thing. One day when I have kids, I can show them.’ And boys, of course, are obsessed with it and know all about it before they’ve seen it. Then I realized, I die in the movies. I feel like it’s kind of a scary thing to show your kid.
The real question is this: did Portman not realize she was going to die in them? Was it sprung on her? Did she assume, as we all did from Leia’s memories of her birth mother as discussed in Return of the Jedi, that Padmé was going to disappear off-screen, in-between trilogies?
Thank god she did Thor. That, her son can see.