Portman and Kunis started training six months before the start of filming in order to attain a body type and muscle tone more similar to those of professional dancers. Portman worked out for five hours a day, doing ballet, cross-training, and swimming. A few months closer to filming, she began choreography training.
The actresses trained for hours a day with a ballerina from the New York City Ballet. By the end, Portman was dancing several hours a day, swimming miles and cross-training, losing almost 20 pounds in the process.
How much dancing did Natalie Portman really do in Black Swan?
In a written statement, "Black Swan" director Darren Aronofsky said, "Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film -- 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. Twenty-eight are her dance double Sarah Lane.
Can child stars go on to credible careers? With her Ivy League credentials and a performance in Black Swan that's put her in line for an Oscar, Natalie Portman proves it can be done... At 29, Natalie Portman has already been in the business a long time.
Production on the reconstituted $13m Black Swan ran for 42 days from December 2009 to March 2010. “Our first 10 days on the shoot were the coldest December New York had seen in 50 years,” Franklin recalls. “As hard as it was shooting on that budget for 42 days, we got a real sense of accomplishment.
Kunis engaged in cardio and Pilates, "train[ing] seven days a week, five hours, for five, six months total, and ... was put on a very strict diet of 1,200 calories a day."
There are simply too many psychological issues going on with Nina. She shows elements of an anxiety disorder with obsessive compulsive behaviors. She also manifests self-injurious behavior and some signs of an eating disorder.
Natalie Portman has transformed herself for many film roles, but nothing was as grueling as her Black Swan makeover. The actress shed an astonishing 20lbs from her already slight frame to play a ballerina in the 2011 film and admitted it put such a toll on her body that she thought she was going to die.
“I studied ballet from when I was 4 until I was 12,” said the petite Portman at the Toronto International Film Festival. “But I stopped when I started acting seriously, then started again for this film when I was 27. So there was a 15-year gap.”
How did Natalie Portman get so small for Black Swan?
Brace says Portman took no shortcuts. The actress herself has admitted she was "barely eating" to get into character. "I was barely eating, I was working 16 hours a day," she told the Daily Mail. "Her body looked accurate," says Brace.
I haven't used her double a lot." Another time when asked whether Portman did all the dancing, he replied "Not everything, but a lot of it. That shot, in the opening prologue when she walks off into the light and she's flapping her wings, and she's on pointe, that is 100%, untouched, no digital Natalie Portman.
Synopsis. The movie opens as Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a young ballerina in her mid twenties, is dancing the prologue to Swan Lake. Swan Lake is a ballet in which a princess is turned into the White Swan and can only be turned back if a man swears eternal fidelity to her.
Upon her morning routine, Portman said “I'm vegan, so I generally have a very clean diet; I usually have oatmeal or avocado toast in the morning. I take vitamins too—vitamin D, and I'm still on prenatal vitamins. I get B12 shots once a month because it's the one thing you don't get from a vegan diet.”
How many calories did Mila Kunis eat for Black Swan?
Mila Kunis has confessed that her diet was restricted to 1,200 calories per day while filming Black Swan. The actress - who shrunk down to 95lbs for her role as a ballet dancer in the film - revealed that she was in "hell" during filming and only ate foods that fit in her hand, reports the Daily Star.
She still made it to America, and eventually had a small pandemic wedding with Mike. However, her married life made Natalie unhappy, which led to "stress eating." Natalie says she is on antidepressants, and gained 30 pounds following her arrival in the U.S.
Did Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis lose weight for Black Swan?
Already lean, Kunis dropped 20 pounds in order to play Natalie Portman's ballerina frenemy in "Black Swan." At 95 pounds, Kunis says "I was muscles, like a little brick house, but skin and bones." Unfortunately, when she gained the weight back, Kunis says it ended up in completely different places.
The night before she is set to perform, Nina becomes convinced that Lily is going to take her place. Her paranoia and mental strain cause her to hallucinate that she's physically turning into the role of Odile, the Black Swan, complete with red eyes and black feathers protruding from bird-like skin.
NOT REAL: Therefore, Lilly and Nina did not have actual sex (we know this because after sex, Lilly said something to Nina about being a ‘Good girl’ and then tried to smother her.
Like other endings of Aronofsky movies, this incorporates surrealist elements as Lily's death was a hallucination. This wouldn't come as a surprise to viewers as the story had already dabbled in the protagonist showing similar behavior in the past.
Kunis had never had any previous experience in ballet, but trained for three months in order to "fake it." Kunis acknowledges that she got "crazy thin," as Stern puts it, weighing about 95 pounds. "I didn't starve myself," Kunis, who's 5' 4," stresses. "I did do it in the healthiest way possible.
Mila Kunis plays an addict in Rodrigo Garcia's “Four Good Days,” and to play the part, she had to lose an extraordinary amount of weight and watch a lot of YouTube videos.
But speaking as a psychiatrist, Lamberti said the film did not accurately depict schizophrenia, as has been widely speculated, but "does present a reasonable portrait of psychosis."
Thomas is obsessed with Nina and ended up raping her before the movie. Nina suppressed her memories of that event, but the trauma manifested in her hallucinations about becoming a swan.
Thomas notes that Nina clearly came with the intention to change his mind, to try and seduce him, in the mildest sense of the word. Thomas wants Nina to lose herself, that is how she can become the Black Swan. Thomas forcefully kisses Nina and she bits him.
