How I Became Jackie Kennedy

Natalie Portman shares the surprising discoveries she made about the iconic First Lady when she took on the role of Jackie Kennedy in what is being touted as an Oscar-winning performance.

Gabrielle Donelly

A doorbell rings in a luxury mansion in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts on a chilly early winter day. A dark-haired woman answers and warily regards the journalist standing on the steps. It’s November 1963 and America is reeling from the assassination of its president, John F Kennedy, just a week earlier, and the reporter has been sent to wrest from his enigmatic widow what really happened that day, and what she’s feeling now.

And so begins Jackie, the acclaimed and, at times, shockingly intimate portrait of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, played by Oscar winner Natalie Portman. Using the Life magazine writer’s interview with the grief-stricken First Lady as its framework, the film moves between that tragic day and its immediate aftermath, weaving in moments from her earlier time in the White House to present her as a highly complex character full of contradictions.

The story of what happened on 22 November in Dallas has been told countless times, of course: the open-car motorcade through the streets; the president smiling and waving; his wife beside him, pretty as a picture in a pink Chanel-inspired suit and pillbox hat. The gunshots, the collapse of the body, and the plunging of an entire nation into grief and bewilderment.

But for Chilean director Pablo Larraín, there’s another story to be told on top of the one related in the official report of the incident, the Warren Commission. ‘The commission gives a very graphic description of the way the president was killed,’ he tells me when we meet in Los Angeles. ‘It was harsh and violent, and it changed everything. But it just says that the president’s wife was “on his left”. We’re telling the story from the point of view that, not only was she sitting next to him, but he was sitting next to her. We wanted to see what happened to her during that time.

‘I did a lot of research on her before I took on this project, and I discovered she was very good at protecting her privacy when she wanted to. There was an incredible amount we didn’t know about what she was really feeling at certain times. I think that in many ways she’s the most unknown of the known women of the 20th century.

‘I couldn’t imagine anyone other than Natalie in the role. She has a quality of mystery to her that I thought was essential to the character. Natalie has the sensibility of Jackie – the beauty, the sophistication – and she resembles her physically, too. But what’s more important to me is that you can look at her, even in close-up, and there’s something you don’t know. There’s something in her eyes that opens to an unknown galaxy. We did a lot of close-ups in the film for that very reason.’

In truth, the familiarity on screen is almost unsettling. The dark dramatic hair framing a porcelain-pretty face. The skittish, fawn-like movements. The breathy little-girl voice. The occasional fleeting moves and glances that betray a core of pure steel. There are times when you’re watching the film that you have to remind yourself it’s not in fact the First Lady, but Natalie Portman.