the butterfly effect; With her stark new haircut, Natalie Portman underwent a brave metamorphosis.(Interview)

Byline: Esther Selsdon

As she walks into an upmarket tapas bar in Barcelona with her immaculately ruffled, close-cropped new hairstyle, Natalie Portman looks the spitting image of Jean Seberg's iconic waif in Godard's A Bout de Souffle-she even has the requisite Mao-style jacket and pants. She may be totally unaware of this resemblance, of course; despite the fact that she played Luke Skywalker's mother in one of the biggest-grossing film series of all time, she's still only 24. Portman is so young, in fact, that she can wave unself-consciously from the other side of the restaurant without attracting undue attention from our fellow diners-or maybe it's the new hairdo.

She's just flown in from Madrid, where, for the last four months, she's been Goya's muse, framed for heresy by a manipulative monk (played by Javier Bardem), in a new film, Goya's Ghosts, directed by Milos Forman. He didn't know her work, but he'd seen her on the cover of Vogue and was captivated by her Goya-esque qualities. Portman's distinctive pale skin, pageboy cheekbones, and understated, urban-teenager style made it difficult for her to maintain her anonymity in Madrid, a city that she found "a strange place to be alone," but she had a lot of fun on Forman's set, delighted to discover that "for the first time ever, some of the crew were even younger than me!" Sadly, however, her potential new friends were constantly working, so on her many days off she "read a lot, visited every museum in Madrid about 27 times, and saw a lot of movies." Portman loves old films, though she hasn't yet managed to catch Forman's early Czech oeuvre: "But I really love Hair so much," she says, breaking into a smile. "Which is funny because I'm not really a hair person."

Portman initially had all her hair shaved off for her gunslinging role as a freedom fighter in V for Vendetta-a new film, out this month, from the creators of The Matrix. "It's something I always wanted to do," she says, "and I had an excuse to do it for this film." At first her bald head drew constant stares, but her hair has now grown out into a gamine look that frames her face, making her resemble a pixie on a growth spurt. Recently, she tells me as she carefully studies the menu, "I've been going to the hairdresser pretty often, otherwise I start looking like a science experiment. I have to go very simple with my choice of clothes now, and I don't wear lipstick or jewelry, because otherwise I overwhelm my head. If I wear anything that has an open neck or back, it shows a lot of skin, so I find myself wearing shorter skirts for balance. But my favorite thing is that I have very funny ears, and they are always on display now. And," she adds as an afterthought, "short hair's easy. It feels grown-up."

Joe Silver, who produced V for Vendetta, calls Portman "a vision to behold, with or without hair," and if she looks grown-up, this accurately reflects her new maturity as an actor. "She was already there in terms of performance-she was brilliant in Closer, for example-but now she's really able to show all her sides. The Wachowski boys [Vendetta's writers] thought she was the only young actress capable of bringing real color to this role, and they were right-she's a tour de force."

The subject matter of Vendetta clearly matters to this half-woman/half-girl. "It's about totalitarian government," she tells me, "but I also hope that it shifts your window on defining terrorism. No one would have said that it was wrong to blow up a building that Hitler was in, for example. People would have hailed that person as a hero. It was amazing fun to film, but I also hope that it's the kind of movie you can go home and fight about with your friends." This is a typical mixed sentiment from Portman, whose reputation as a politically engaged, water-drinking vegetarian marches solemnly before her but who, at heart, is still just a girl in her 20s with a funky new haircut who wants to have a big ...