Natalie Portman Explains How She Grew 9 Inches Taller for 'Thor: Love & Thunder'

Natalie Portman underwent a major physical transformation for her role in Thor: Love and Thunder.

In a new interview with Variety, the 41-year-old actress shared that she worked with a trainer for 10 months to bulk up for her role as the Mighty Thor.

But since Natalie‘s character also stands six feet tall – nearly 10 inches larger than her natural height – she had to increase her height for the film as well.

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“I definitely got as big as I’ve ever been,” she told the outlet. “You realize, ‘Oh, this must be so different, to walk through the world like this.’”

“As a 5-foot-3 woman, I don’t know that I’m ever going to be cast again as a 6-foot character,” Natalie added with a laugh. “I really relished people seeing me as big.”

Director Taika Waititi and his crew devised a low-tech way to make her appear taller for her scenes with her co-stars.

“We’d rehearse the scene, they’d see the path, and then they’d build a path that was like one foot off the ground or whatever, and I would just walk on that,” Natalie explained.

When asked about the system, Natalie‘s co-star Tessa Thompson immediately started laughing.

“They would call it a deck, but depending on the accent, sometimes it sounded like something else,” the actress recalled. “Because we’re all children.”

“It was actually one of our running jokes,” Natalie said before getting up to demonstrate how Chris Hemsworth would contort his body to cross the deck without breaking his stride. “Chris would have to…” she said, attempting to take a wide step while keeping her head level. She giggled: “They’d all have to navigate my deck!”

The overall experience on the film gave her a new appreciation as to what Chris had to do to maintain his heroic appearance throughout his years in the MCU.

“It’s a quite intense and quite disciplined lifestyle to get to that appearance,” she said. “Chris works so, so hard. Just constantly, every time he has a break, he has to be doing some sort of training… It’s also the eating and saunas and ice baths and sleep, all this stuff to get everything looking right. It’s a full-time job!”

Thor: Love and Thunder is set to hit theaters on July 8. You can check out the latest trailer for the movie here.