Portman

Speaking of V for Vendetta, another reason I’m looking forward to seeing it is Natalie Portman. Every time we talk about actors we like or don’t like around here, she’s one of the people who tends to get a lot of thumbs-down, but I love her. And to anyone who insists the girl can’t act, I refer you promptly to Leon (aka The Professional).

Anyhow, she’s also profiled in April’s issue of Vanity Fair (which you can read here), and here are some more reasons for me to love her rotten:

She wears sneakers every day (usually Converse), and for special events, like the Oscars or Golden Globes, a brand called Beyond Skin, vegan footwear that looks a lot like Easy Spirit. She doesn't wear diamonds to such events, but rather "conflict-free" earrings, such as $3 knockoffs from a place called Claire's that she swears look just the same. She drives a Prius…

Anyone who has spent real time with her invariably comes away mesmerized; first by her exquisite beauty, which she seems oblivious to, and then by the thing that sets her apart from almost every actor in Hollywood—a total, intelligent absorption in everything but herself. Her curiosity about the world knows no bounds. She will talk breathlessly about her old law professor Alan Dershowitz's ideas on justified torture, or about how the New Zealand Moriori tribe's philosophy of nonviolence doomed them to extinction, or how the two-party system is hampering American politics. She never sounds pompous, because it's all punctuated with "like"s, goofy laughs, and the word "super," which she frequently uses as a prefix to adjectives. "She's got a little bit of the spaz going on," says Peter Sarsgaard, who worked with her in 2004's Garden State…

And for the past few years she has thrown herself into her charitable work with the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), an organization she discovered through a meeting with Queen Rania of Jordan that provides micro-loans to poor women in developing countries who are starting small businesses. Between trips for FINCA to Uganda, Guatemala, and Ecuador, she has had one-on-one sit-downs with members of Congress, including Hillary Clinton and John McCain, to discuss the organization and its issues.

If things seriously go down the crapper big time in this joint, my sincerest hope is that Natalie Portman buys a small island somewhere with her Star Wars residuals and invites us all to live there, where we’ll immediately crown her our progressive princess.

And in case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s some extra NP fun for your viewing pleasure. It's, like, totally superhilarious.