W Magazine March 2008 : Scarlett Johansson & Natalie Portman by Steven Klein

[mikel]

Wow his third W cover in a row. Scarlett looks like a deer caught in a headlight in every pic.

[MissMagAddict]

source | wmagazine

Sister Act

Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman—cast as rivalrous siblings in The Other Boleyn Girl—have seemingly nothing in common. But as it turns out, the utterly uninhibited bombshell and the self-possessed pixie are more like sisters than you'd think.

It's not easy to find a man whose celebrity crush list includes both Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. Both actresses are gorgeous, sure, but in such different ways that they seem almost of separate species. The 23-year-old Johansson is a modern Marilyn Monroe, complete with platinum mane, fleshy curves and a sexy-throaty voice. The 26-year-old Portman, in contrast, is the very embodiment of delicacy and refinement: small, perfectly shaped features, boyish body and careful Ivy League diction.
Early on a Sunday morning, as they bide their time on the set of their W photo shoot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the actresses’ odd-couple demeanors are on full display. Johansson, still in her terrycloth robe, is a blur of movement: kidding around with the makeup artist, roughhousing with Maggie, her Chihuahua, and periodically breaking into a rave-style dance to the beat of the techno music playing in the background. Meanwhile, Portman, having finished her breakfast of granola and fruit, her hair and makeup already done, is silently perched in a corner, her Hepburn-slim legs crossed demurely, filling out a Sunday New York Times crossword at a pace that would make Will Shortz wonder whether he’s slipping.
The two actresses seem to live on opposite ends of the asceticism-hedonism spectrum. Over dinner, Johansson’s eyes widen at the arrival of her chicken quesadillas, still sizzling on the plate. “Don’t you miss quesadillas?” she asks Portman, who’s ordered an eggplant dish that suits her newly vegan diet. (A vegetarian for animal rights reasons since she was eight, Portman recently decided to nix animal by-products too.) “I mean, I could not eat meat,” continues Johansson, as if her question had been purely rhetorical, “but the cheese, the cheese! I would miss tuna too. And yogurt….”
Portman, as succinct as Johansson is loquacious, answers gamely: “Yeah, I don’t know how long it will last.”
Given their differences, Johansson and Portman make for unlikely sisters. But that’s precisely what they play in the movie The Other Boleyn Girl, out February 29 and based on Philippa Gregory’s best-selling novel of the same name. The book blends highbrow historical drama with soapy intrigue—“history through porn,” Portman calls it—and was the ubiquitous book club pick of 2002. The fictionalized plot details how the quiet and innocent Mary Boleyn was actually the mistress of King Henry VIII before her sister, the scheming and sassy Anne, made a play for his affections and eventually became queen. And even more unexpected than their having been cast as sisters is the fact that Portman plays Anne and Johansson is Mary.
“It’s funny, quite a lot of people said, ‘Shouldn’t it be the other way around?’” says Alison Owen, the film’s producer, who notes that Johansson and Portman were the hands-down first choices to play the rivalrous siblings. “Scarlett is the street-smart one, the initiator. And Natalie has a wisdom and a cleverness about her; she’s more of a quiet authority. But I knew it would be intriguing for them to play something removed from a lot of the roles they’ve done.”

Read the rest of the article at wmagazine.com

[MissMagAddict]

source | wmagazine

Photographed by Eric Ogden
Styled by Carolyn Tate Angel

Fresh Page
Actress Ellen Page is young, talented and unimpressed by Hollywood hoopla

Ellen Page is 20, but the actress—a tomboy pixie dressed in jeans and a hoodie—looks like the kind of 16-year-old you’d see smoking outside a 7-Eleven. And like a lot of smart, bored kids, Page likes to give the impression that everything is No Big Deal, even her breakout role two years ago as a psychopathic teen who lures and tortures a suspected pedophile in the indie film Hard Candy. “It’s just what I do, you know?” she says, downing a shot of espresso in a midtown restaurant. “It’s no big deal, that’s kind of my attitude.” Despite the fact that Page’s next star turn, in Juno, is being called one of the smartest, brightest performances of the year, the wispy Canadian exudes none of the cheery, I’m-so-blessed vibes of a star on the rise. Instead, she seems intent on proving she’s untouched by any of the Hollywood baloney. Fashion, for instance, doesn’t move her. “I go to these photo shoots and they’re talking to me about designers, but this is how I like to dress,” she says, tugging at her flannel shirt. What about promoting last year’s X-Men: The Last Stand, her first taste of big-budget filmmaking? Shrug. “We did the junket; we went to Cannes.”
In Juno, opening in December and directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking), Page plays Juno MacGuff, a sarcastic, punk rock–loving Minnesota teenager who finds herself pregnant after a fling with her bandmate (Superbad star Michael Cera). She decides to have the baby and give it to a yuppie couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) who are looking to adopt. A far cry from the typical teen screen caricatures—the jock, the mean girl, the nerd—Juno is remarkably nuanced: self-confident but not bitchy; quirky but not a social outcast. And unlike most ugly ducklings, who are, by movie’s end, transformed into stylish swans, Juno starts out not so cute and only gets fatter and less fashionable (she’s pregnant, after all). “I would have loved to see a character in a film like that when I was in junior high school,” says Page, whose mother is a first-grade teacher and father is a graphic designer. “Juno likes to rock out as herself, and I respect that.”
Page got her big break at age 10, when a casting director came to her elementary school in Halifax, Nova Scotia, seeking fresh talent for a CBC television movie. She worked steadily through her teens, mainly in Canadian films and TV, before landing the part as the baby-faced aggressor in Hard Candy. She’s stayed mostly on the thorny path of hard-to-watch films ever since. In Mouth to Mouth (2006) she shaves her head and joins a cult. In this year’s The Tracey Fragments she’s a disturbed teen wandering the streets. And in the upcoming Showtime docudrama An American Crime she plays Sylvia Likens, a teenager who in 1965 was locked in a basement and tortured to death. “She’s a spectacular actress, incapable of having a false moment,” says Reitman.
Bateman agrees that Page is the real deal. “She’s not wondering if she’s a job away from the pot of gold or whether she’s finally getting access to the best dresses for the Academy Awards,” he says. “She’s genuinely not impressed with those things.”
It probably helps that the actress still lives in her hometown, where one of her best friends is a dog trainer and another works in a pizza place. Moving to L.A. or, say, partying with the cast of The Hills is just not her style. “I think if I moved there and did that,” she says without a trace of a smile, “I would get really depressed and I might die."

[testinofan]

Thanks MMA

[mikel]

Soldiering On

A high-profile divorce made last year the worst of Ryan Phillippe’s life. Now, with some perspective and an intense new role, he’s ready to move forward.


You’d think it would be easy to spot Ryan Phillippe. He’s told me to meet him at the Viceroy hotel in Santa Monica. Outside, one of the heaviest rains in years is beginning to fall, and the lobby is practically empty. I station myself on a chaise longue right in front of the main door, where I’ll be sure to get a good look at anyone who enters. A guy walks in wearing a couple days’ worth of stubble, a gray sweatshirt, black cargo pants and a tweed military cap with the brim pulled low. I stare right at his face and then go back to reading the paper. It’s only when this stranger circles back toward the men’s room that I realize my mistake. I sheepishly call out to his back, “Ryan…” When Phillippe turns around, I apologize for not recognizing him, blaming the hat.
“Good,” he says. “It works.”
After the year Phillippe has had, one can easily understand why he’d want to travel incognito. His divorce from Reese Witherspoon—she filed papers in November 2006, and the proceedings were finalized this past October—had tabloids picking over every excruciating detail of their lives in search of what went wrong with the Hollywood golden couple.
The 33-year-old actor is understandably not eager to rehash the specifics. But he is forthright, genuine, even a little vulnerable when the topic comes up. Asked if he’s slowed down his acting career—his upcoming film, Stop-Loss, about Iraq war soldiers, is one of just two films he’s made in two years—he says, “I’ve had a lot of upheaval in my personal life. I wanted to take time to make sure that my kids were okay and to build a new life that was going to be suitable to being a single parent. Every once in a while you kind of want to take a step back and refocus to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.”
A little later, Phillippe says his divorce was “the darkest, saddest place I had ever been. It was a struggle—there were a good four or five months of not being able to get out of bed. It was the worst time in my life.” These days, things are better. “You get through it. It’s a process that’s not easy, but I get less and less sad about it every day.”

Phillippe plays an Iraq war soldier in the upcoming film Stop-Loss.

The Delaware native was cast in his first major part in 1992, as a gay teenager on the soap opera One Life to Live. Television and movie roles followed, but his breakout film was the 1997 teen horror romp I Know What You Did Last Summer. In recent years, he’s taken on more serious fare, such as Robert Altman’s English country-home murder mystery, Gosford Park; Paul Haggis’s meditation on racism, Crash; Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers; and, coming to theaters in March, Stop-Loss, directed by Kimberly Peirce, her first film since her Oscar-winning debut, Boys Don’t Cry, in 1999.

By Gabriel Snyder
Portrait by Tierney Gearon

wmagazine.com

[Fabulyss]

Wow, they have Natalie and Scarlett and this is all they could come up with? That's just terrible.

[Faith Akiyama]

Natalie looks amazing as usual.

[mikel]

Originally Posted by Fabulyss

Wow, they have Natalie and Scarlett and this is all they could come up with? That's just terrible.

I know it is such a let down I hope there is more, but I doubt it.

[Moonchild]

Fresh Page was featured in a previous issue and not the upcoming March one I believe....

[mikel]

^oops, I thought it looks familiair.

[LetThemEatCake]

Boring issue. W is no better than Bazaar or US Vogue with all the celebs they put on their cover these days.

[Meg]

Originally Posted by mikel

Wow his third W cover in a row. Scarlett looks like a deer caught in a headlight in every pic.

yes I agree. It's like she's trying to do 'intense' and 'dark' but doesn't know how. I thought 'poor scarlett, they just chose a bad pic of her for the cover' but now that she looks like that in ALL the photos I see they had no choice. It's too bad since Natalie really eclipses her in every photo.

[TheKiwi]

Natalie looks lovely, but I'm not so keen on Scarlett here.

[Cosette]

I'm not a fan of either of them, although Scarlett has sometimes surprised me. Regardless, her occasional poor film choices pretty much overshadow that. Natalie looks okay in these, but this concept screams for real models, and neither of them can really pull it off imo. Scarlett definitely can't.

[mikel]

Originally Posted by Meg

yes I agree. It's like she's trying to do 'intense' and 'dark' but doesn't know how. I thought 'poor scarlett, they just chose a bad pic of her for the cover' but now that she looks like that in ALL the photos I see they had no choice. It's too bad since Natalie really eclipses her in every photo.

agree 100%