Natalie Portman says women are ‘expected to behave’ differently than men at Cannes Film Festival

Natalie Portman is calling out the different standards held for men and women. The actress spoke about the expectations between genders during a press conference on Sunday for her new movie.

Portman is starring in the upcoming film ‘May December,’ a romantic comedy that follows an actress traveling to Maine to study the life of a real-life woman (played by Julianne Moore) that she is set to play in a movie. The movie premiered at the 76th Annual Cannes Film Festival this weekend.

“The whole film is so much about performance and the different roles we play in different environments, for different people, for ourselves, even,” Portman, said, adding that the concept is “something I’m definitely curious about and interested in.”

What is ‘May December’ about?

The film’s premise is described as, “Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple with a large age disparity buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.”

“This aspect of, even here — the different ways we as women are expected to behave at this festival even compared to men,” she told reporters during the press conference. “How we’re supposed to look, how we’re supposed to carry ourselves.”

“The expectations are different on you all the time and it affects how you behave, whether you’re buying into it, whether you’re rejecting it or whether you’re doing something in between,” Portman added. “You’re definitely defined by the social structures upon you.”

Age difference depicted in film

In the upcoming film, the couple portrayed by Moore and Charles Melton prepare their children to graduate from high school and go to college some years after their 20-year age difference sparked tabloid obsession when the pair first got together.

Their upcoming change in the family’s life is magnified by Portman’s character who arrives to study the family for a movie based on their lives.

“An age gap is one thing, but a relationship between an adult and a child is something else entirely,” Moore, 62, added, when asked about the film’s depiction of a romantic relationship with a significant age difference.

She continues, “Her transgression, I believe, personally, is so enormous that she sort of buries it in her own identity, in her own performative femininity.”