Natalie Portman Is Going to Space and Back for ‘Pale Blue Dot’
Natalie Portman is heading to space. Well — for a movie. A few years ago, Fox Searchlight teamed up again with Reese Witherspoon after the success of Wild to make a movie about a female astronaut dealing with how difficult it is to return home after months in space. Since Witherspoon is now committed to doing a second season of HBO’s smash hit Big Little Lies, the studio has recast her role with Portman.
According to Variety, Portman is in talks for the movie, which will be directed by Fargo and Legion’s Noah Hawley, with a script written by Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi. The film “follows a successful female astronaut who, after coming back home from a mission in space, starts to unravel when confronted by her seemingly perfect American dream life. The film explores the theory that astronauts who spend long periods of time in space begin to lose their sense of reality when they return home.”
That description is similar to how soldiers who have spent a long time deployed, or explorers who spend most of their time in foreign lands, feel displaced and strange when they’re back home and find it difficult to assimilate into normal day-to-day life. Ray Bradbury wrote a very good short story about this very phenomenon — a man who spends all his time in space missing home, but all his time at home wanting to go back up into space — called “The Rocket Man.”
Fox is now looking for a male co-star for Portman and hopes to begin shooting the movie in spring.
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