Over Thanksgiving brisket, 20 years of marriage ends. Maddie Schwartz walks out of her Baltimore home, with its new kitchen (“I thought you liked the new kitchen,” says her clueless husband), a free woman. In the seven-part Lady in the Lake, Natalie Portman plays Maddie, whose childhood ambition to be an investigative journalist is unleashed after she explodes her own life – and hustles on to the city paper, the Baltimore Star.
It is Portman’s first real venture into television in a career that has spanned 30 years. From her film debut as a 12-year-old in Leon to her Oscar-winning ballet dancer in Black Swan, blockbusters (Star Wars’ Padmé Amidala and Thor’s Jane Foster) and intelligent indies such as Closer, she’s never been on the small screen. Why? “I just didn’t have the right project,” says Portman over a scratchy line from LA. “This felt natural because it was a character I felt excited to explore in this form – it’s such a playground when you have seven hours.”
