Black Swan’s Body Double Sarah Lane Speaks Out!


Uh-oh- Cat’s outta the bag. Let me preface the latter with this, we in the dance world were never dooped into believing that Natalie Portman trained and starved herself into Soloist level dancing in a year. However there are those for whom the Willing Suspension of Disbelief was in full effect while watching Black Swan and it allowed them to believe Portman when she said “I’m the Swan Queen!”.
So Sarah Lane opened her trap and told everyone what was clearly obvious from the start, and that is that she did the majority of the dancing in the film and producers are in a scramble in trying stop what they see as the tarnishing of Portman’s Oscar. Let me assure them, most people could careless, Really there are bigger issues in the world then whether ore not Natalie Portman can execute 32 fouettés like um let me seeee…..um JAPAN!!!
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The professional dancer who worked as Natalie Portman’s dance double for the Academy Award-nominated film, ‘Black Swan,’ is claiming she’s the victim of a “cover-up,” Entertainment Weekly reports. The ballerina told the magazine the film and its producers are misleading the public about how much dancing Portman actually did in the movie.

“Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says Sarah Lane, 27, an American Ballet Theatre soloist. “All the other shots are me.” Lane performed most of the film’s complicated dance sequences and allowed Portman’s face to be digitally grafted onto her body.

Here is the part that rings true to me – I could see this happening:

One of Lane’s most surprising admissions to EW: that ‘Black Swan’ producer Ari Handel asked her not to talk about her work to the press.

“They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” Lane said.

“It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”
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