Hollywood Everafter

Why would actress Natalie Portman turn down the chance to be in a film with Oscar winning Meryl Streep?

The answer lies in Portman’s attitude toward Roman Catholic vocations.

“Doubt,” a film adaptation of the successful play by John Patrick Shanley (who, incidentally, directs the movie), tells the story of two nuns (Meryl Streep and Amy Adams) that confront a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) whom they suspect of abusing an altar boy. Themes of religion, morality and authority punctuate the dialogue.

Portman reportedly wanted to co-star in the movie but turned down the part for what seems like a fairly flimsy reason, considering that she’s supposed to be a professional.

“We asked Natalie Portman, and Natalie was very interested but kept saying she had a problem. And we finally nailed down as to what the problem was: she basically said she didn’t understand celibacy,” Shanley told the GossipSauce Web site.

If it took so much brainpower to understand celibacy, Portman probably could have benefited from a class in abstinence.

Instead she’s likely to find out that she made a bad career move by ultimately denying herself what actors lust after most, and that is prestige, which in Hollywood comes in the form of a little gold statue.

“Doubt” opens in limited release on December 12, just in time to qualify for Oscar’s attention.

James Hirsen, J.D., M.A. in Media Psychology, is a media analyst, teacher of mass media and entertainment law at Biola University and professor at Trinity Law School.