Natalie Portman steps out with Aleph amid mass ‘Jane Got a Gun’ clusterwhoops

Here are some new photos of Natalie Portman with her nearly 2-year-old son Aleph yesterday in Los Feliz. According to Fame/Flynet, she had taken him to a Jewish community center. Much like January Jones’ son Xander, Aleph seemed kind of ginger-y when he was small, but as he gets older, his hair is becoming more straight-forward blonde. I’m not trying to throw coal on the conspiracy fires, so I’ll just say that I think it’s interesting that two dark-haired people produced such a fair, tow-headed child. Cough.

Natalie is currently filming Jane Got a Gun, which might go down as the most cursed project of 2013. The most cursed project of 2011-2012 was probably World War Z, but a lot of WWZ’s curses were self-inflicted, plus that film is just HUGE. Jane Got a Gun was supposed to be a smaller, hyper-violent drama, and Natalie believes in the project so much, she’s producing the mess. This is what has happened so far:

*Michael Fassbender was hired, but then he quit a few days before the production began, claiming that he had scheduling conflicts with X-Men: Days of Future Past.

*Jude Law quit the film the day before the production began.

*The director Lynne Ramsey quit the production on the first day – she quit by NEVER SHOWING UP. Cinematographer Darius Khondji quit the production that first week “out of solidarity” with Ramsey.

*They hired director Gavin O’Connor to replace Ramsey. He had to come in and hit the ground running, because producers refused to delay production at first, although at this point they are doing a “phased shutdown.” Whatever that means.

*Joel Edgerton is still in the production (I think), but he’s changed parts a few times.

*Bradley Cooper took on one of the roles vacated by Fassbender or Law, but then he quit a few days ago too, claiming scheduling conflicts.

*The producers went to Jake Gyllenhaal and offered him the role that Bradley vacated, and Jake wasn’t into it. I think the part – the crucial role of “Jane’s ex-boyfriend” – is still vacant as we speak. Basically this thing is a HUGE mess.

*Breaking: Ewan McGregor just stepped into one of the vacant roles. He should be out of the production by the end of the week!

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.

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70 Responses to “Natalie Portman steps out with Aleph amid mass ‘Jane Got a Gun’ clusterwhoops”

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  1. Lolitalola says:

    She surely makes the strangest face expressions I have ever seen. Aleph is already so tall for such a young child !

  2. Gillian says:

    Regarding the hair – my parents are dark-haired and dark-eyed, so are my brother and I… and our baby sister is a blue-eyed blond. With the exact same features the rest of us have, just a different coloring.

    Because light hair and eyes are recessive, it’s actually not that difficult for dark-colored parents to have light-colored kids. They just both need to carry the relevant genes without expressing them.

    • elkiddo says:

      True. It’s the basic Mendel Theory.

    • LadyMTL says:

      Yeah, I was going to say something similar. Both of my parents are Middle Eastern and I have dark hair and eyes but my brother is a blue-eyed blond. My father had blond hair when he was a kid and it gradually got darker, so maybe that’s what will happen here.

    • Lulu.T.O. says:

      Blond hair and light eyes are recessive, whereas dark hair and eyes are dominant (very simplified explanation). Both Natalie and her husband must be heterozygous for those traits. Genetics is so fascinating!

    • Emily says:

      Yep, this. It’s incredibly common, basic 9th grade science class stuff.

      • Poink517 says:

        Exactly. My parents both have brown hair and brown eyes, and as a baby/toddler, my brother’s hair was white blond and his eyes are green. No conspiracy here.

    • mollyb says:

      Hair and eye color are not controlled by simple Mendelian genetics, as we were all taught in school. In reality, many genes working in conjunction control our hair and eye color, which is why it is perfectly possible, although uncommon, for two blue eyed people to produce a brown eyed child. There is nothing strange or surprising or suspicious about two dark-haired people having a fair child.

      • Miss M says:

        @mollyb: Thank you. I was getting upset over the simplistic explanations, but I was hoping someone would step in…

    • Em says:

      Exactly. Nothing to see here. I have known many, many people, including in my family, who are both brown hair, brown eyed and have a child who is blond. That boy will most likely have brown hair by his next birthday. I have a cousin who had platinum blond hair as a baby/toddler, but who now has dark brown hair. Super common.

    • dinah says:

      Thank you! I was just about to pitch in with herterozygosity vs. homozygosity.

  3. KLO says:

    Middle and eastern european people and those who have some jewish ancestors, often are blonde as children and brunette as adults. Goes for my whole family.

    • Leen says:

      Very true. I know someone who is a full on ginger, with the freckles, white skin and blue yes… you would have never guessed her parents are dark-skinned arabs with brown eyes and hair! But apparently there’s quite alot of gingers in their family, hence why she turned out to be ginger.

    • Crumpets and Crotchshots says:

      Goes for my family too– my mothers family is Sicilian, Turkish, Syrian, and Jewish; my grandfather and aunt were blonde with green eyes, while my mother was as dark olive as dark olive gets with dark hair and black eyes.

      • xoxokaligrl says:

        Same thing goes for hispanics. Tow headed children can come with any race. However the kids complexion is not the same as either of them.

      • xoxokaligrl says:

        Same thing goes for hispanics, tow headed children can come with any race. However the kids complexion is not the same as either of them.

      • xoxokaligrl says:

        Same thing goes for hispanics, tow headed children can come with any race. However the kids complexion isnt similar to the parents.

    • Raquel says:

      Wow, I guess these photos prove that more than a decade of semi-continuous bitch face really does make it tough for a girl to smile normally later in life.

  4. Jenna says:

    Eh about the hair thing. Mom and dad are both dark haired (black Irish with a bit of Welsh and Scotish respectively – as they always insist of saying) and while my hair was black at birth, it fell out mere weeks on the planet, came back red, faded to blond then freaking ~white~ blond until I was about 7 when it swent to honey then dark. Its why my dad’s nickname for me is ‘his calico kitten” it happens. And with all the dying and bleaching and dying I do – who knows what it really is now under the black and blues. So meh about the poor kids hair.

    That being said? This movie is going to flame and burn HARD.

    • Furious George says:

      Calico kitten!! That’s so sweet!!

      Also, this movie is cursed, etc etc.

  5. Cristina says:

    The baby gives me Julian Assange vibes… That would be quite strange.

  6. don't kill me i'm french says:

    last year,Nathalie P came in a kid clothes shop (Bon Point at Paris)with his son and she was not happy when the saleswoman said her that her kid was big.The woman thought “big as tall”

    • lee says:

      maybe that’s just a translation thing? I used to HATE when teachers at my french immersion school would say i was ‘grande’ because even though I knew it meant tall, it sounded like they were saying I was big or fat, which of course was not what they meant because that would be ‘grosse’ and also it would be very rude. ah, teenage insecurities.

    • Liv says:

      Haha, would love to see her face when somebody tells her her kid is “big” 😉

      Maybe he just looks tall because she’s so tiny??

  7. T.Fanty says:

    Oh, Ewan, no. He doesn’t need a paycheck that badly.

    • ncboudicca says:

      I know it…why, Ewan, why???

    • anon33 says:

      THIS. Bad enough he was in the prequels with her…

    • Crumpets and Crotchshots says:

      This film is such a disaster so far I think that should opt instead to make an absurdist film about the making of the film. *That* I would watch.

      Ewan, why, why, why.

      EDIT: there was a rumor that Hiddles pitched for this one. Looks like he dodged another bullet.

    • j.eyre says:

      This reminds me of the headline from The Onion:

      “Ewan McGregor wins valiant battle against fame”

  8. Lucretia says:

    Joel Edgerton is filling the role of Jane’s ex-lover; he was the villain, then stepped into the ex-lover role when Fassbender left.

  9. Jackie Jormp Jomp (formerly Zelda) says:

    That’s not how genetics works, and it’s super annoying that gossip sites always harp on stuff like that. Recessive genes: they work. It’s hardly some miracle that she has a blonde kid.

    • Oops says:

      and I think her father is ginger and we don’t know about Millepied’s family (not sure I write it correctly)

    • Katie says:

      Thank you! Speaking as an American (on U.S. soil lol), I don’t understand – did no one take biology during the (at least) THIRTEEN YEARS they spent in school? I’m fairly young, so maybe teaching genetics was a fad in the late 90s/early 00s.

      School – it’s not just for finding your future spouse (that you’ll divorce anyway).

    • V4Real says:

      I’m with you guys on this. But I just wanted to add my two cents by saying google or research African babies born with blond hair and blue eyes; people would be surprised. Also the Aboriginal Australians have had kids born with those same features.

  10. Maria says:

    there were pictures months ago with natalies dad and there you could see where his hair comes from.

  11. Mandy says:

    I don’t think too much of the hair situation. My husband and I both have dark hair and our daughter is a very bright blonde. And I promise my husband is the father! 🙂

  12. Itsjustblanche. says:

    I understand that some new-ish moms let personal hygiene go a bit. They’re tired and super busy. But when you have the kind of support system she has, there’s no excuse to look like you haven’t bathed in a while.

    • Katie says:

      I think she looks fine. I do think she should have gone with darker jeans, though.

  13. kay says:

    kind of seems like you don’t understand genetics. a) hair gets darker as you get older, it’s entirely possible his parents had lighter hair when they were younger. b) blonde hair is recessive, meaning that if both his parents had one blonde gene the child has a 1 in 4 chance of being blonde. not everything is a massive conspiracy

  14. Syko says:

    The hair doesn’t matter. My hair is dark brown (helped along by L’Oreal these days) and both my parents were dark, my husband had brown hair, his dad was dark and his mother blonde. All three of my kids were born with blonde hair, and they are all brunettes now.

  15. Faye says:

    Just piggybacking on what everyone else is saying, but genetically, there is no issue with two dark-haired parents having a light-haired child. My parents have black hair, olive skin, and brown eyes, and I have honey-blonde hair, blue eyes, and super-pale skin. All you need is two parents with dominant heterozygous genes for hair color (since dark is dominant), and you have a 25% chance of having a light-haired child every time they reproduce.

    As a side note, both my brothers look exactly like my parents, and I got really tired as a child of being asked if I was adopted by total strangers. The summer was the worst, since my brothers became very tan and looked Middle Eastern. One time my brother and I got pulled out of the security line for extra questioning on a flight to Israel. We had the hardest time convincing El Al security that in fact we were brother and sister and not a potential terrorist and his Western girlfriend (which apparently is a common profile, I guess).

    • Leen says:

      Faye, don’t feel too bad El Al are the most notorious airline that conducts VERY hardline security checks. I’ve flown with a lot of airlines but El Al was absolutely the worse… it’s the only airline I was personally escorted with only my passport and money to my seat. They were sued for racial discrimination and the two men who put the case forward won.

      • Faye says:

        I’ve flown with El Al a lot, and every time I fly, whether by myself or with someone, I get pulled out of line. I feel like telling them to switch up the routine because I can predict every question they’ll ask during the follow-up questioning, so it’s not effective anymore. It’s become kind of a joke among my friends and family.

        It’s annoying, but to be honest, I try not to get too upset about it. They need really tight security because they get bomb threats, credible ones, regularly, and they are in more danger than other airlines of terror attacks. I just hope they actually pull real bad guys out of line and not just me, LOL.

      • Leen says:

        I was once pulled out from a school group when we were flying with El Al cause I was the only one who was ‘obviously’ non-European/Israeli and even when my Israeli teacher told them I was part of the group, nope, to no avail =/

        Nah I understand, I fly out of Ben Gurion airport a lot and the security guards are sort of okay and nice about searching but lord have mercy if you are flying with El Al!
        Although I’ve heard that they laxed their security a bit, but I’m not about to find out trust me 😛

      • Faye says:

        Leen — If it makes you feel any better, I am very obviously European-American, and they still go after me every time. And Ben-Gurion is the same way. I was just in Israel this February with my husband, and we were flying British Airways, and he sailed through and I got pulled aside. It really is kind of funny at this point. I don’t blame you for picking another airline, though!

  16. bsh says:

    About the hair, it’s too early to predict how it will turn out in the end. My parents have dark hair and brown eyes, but as both their mothers (my granmas) were blue-eyed my sister has got blue/grey and I have hazel/green eyes. And I was 100% blonde until I was 2, then slowly turned to dark brown.

    • Marty says:

      He really is starting to look like Darren now. Literally the spitting image.(sorry I meant to put this comment futher down)

  17. PHD Gossip says:

    The point is the kid is a dead ringer for Darren Aronofsky. Boom.

    • Ai says:

      Exactly! I think so too. It is not so much about genetics for me but the fact that I believe the theory that this baby is DA’s.

    • lamgirls3 says:

      I wondered if I was the only one who noticed that.

    • Violet says:

      Yup, pretty much. He also bears a marked resemblance to Darren Aronofsky’s son with Rachel Weisz:

      http://www.justjared.com/2007/07/29/henry-aronofsky-walking/

    • karmasabiatch! says:

      Guys, seriously.

      Before anyone makes accusations like that about a child or said child’s mother, have you even bothered to view pictures of his father? Benjamin Millepied has light eyes, a VERY pronounced forehead and looks like he could have been a ginger when younger.

      FCS.

    • Mouse says:

      I was thinking that too. Hair color aside, the kid looks nothing like Millepede and a lot like Aronofsky. Not judging, just making an observation.

    • Kate says:

      The baby looked like his maternal grandfather in a photograph published earlier on this site (?) – noticed similarity of chin and colouring.

  18. stellalovejoydiver says:

    I think the problems mainly have to do with Nat Portman being a producer and therefore acting like an entitled diva control freak.
    That “director Lynne Ramsey quit the production on the first day – she quit by NEVER SHOWING UP.” is a spin from Portman and the other producers.

    From ONTD:
    “Following her dramatic withdrawal last week from her first Hollywood movie on the first day of shooting, director Lynne Ramsay(We need to talk about Kevin) will take some time to recover her reputation. Ramsay failed to turn up for the beginning of Jane Got a Gun, the feminist western she’d been preparing for months in Los Angeles. While this is unprecedented behaviour for a director, I understand that Ramsay believes she had no choice but to withdraw from the film after a series of compromises over cast and locations reached critical mass, including a falling out with the film’s star and co-producer, Natalie Portman. I understand the problem also stemmed from Ramsay having been promised final cut on the movie, but it having become clear that this was not going to happen.”

    So Ramsay was contractally promised certain creative decisions, when those were not fulfilled she legally exited the contract, otherwise they could have forced her to do it.
    It´s a shame that Portman and the other producers would stomp so low and ruin her reputation like this.
    Fassbender, Law and the other actors prob left because the behind the scenes drama and maybe also over how Ramsay was treated.

    • Chordy says:

      Yeah, I believe Law said he only took the role in order to work with Ramsay, so when she quit, he quit too. IMO this is the best Hollywood gossip out there right now. Way more interesting than whatever Kim Kardashian is wearing today. I can’t wait to see how this pans out. Ramsay is incredibly respected, but Portman is incredibly powerful.

      • stellalovejoydiver says:

        Despite all their attempts of dragging Ramsay, she was announced as a judge at Cannes film festival shortly after that and they fail at signing a halfway respected B-list actor for that movie, so I think Ramsay wins.
        Portman might have some pull in Hollywood, but antics like that won´t bode well especially with people in the European film industry which is more of an auteur film industry opposed to an star driven industry, but I also think a lot of actors in HW might side with Ramsay, I don´t think Portman with her holier than thou vegan Havard shtick has that many loyal friends in HW.

    • FLORC says:

      Stella/Chordy
      I’ve been trying to follow this, but the info coming out isn’t covered often and is very cryptic.
      She sounds as bad and even worse as people are now starting to talk about her.
      The Oscar and Black Swan scandals put a small target on her back imo.

      • stellalovejoydiver says:

        ONTD has some articles about it:

        -HuffPost Entertainment reached out to Ramsay’s manager for comment on the situation. In a twist, the director’s representative was Jessica Steindorff, Scott’s daughter.

        “My father Scott Steindorff prevails under extreme amounts of stress and the show will go on,” Jessica Steindorff said to HuffPost Entertainment via email. “Sorry, but in this town it’s family first.” The younger Steindorff wrote that she no longer manages Ramsay.

        2)Look, I get it, we’ve now spent far too much time covering the Jane Got a Gun story*. But I’m always fascinated by the lengths people in the film business will go for even the most trivial of positive spin. These are people who do seem to truly believe that everyone in the world reads Nikki Finke. Which brings us to Jane Got a Gun producer Scott Steindorff, who’s been giving quotes to Deadline all week about how shocked he was when director Lynne Ramsay dropped out of the movie. SHOCKED! And she left with nary a reason, I’m sure. And now, apparently, Steindorff has his assistant emailing people to get more positive comments on the story.
        http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/76336492.html

        3)This is a really interesting read as well:
        Behind-the-scenes info (somewhat contradictory) on the Jane Got a Gun fiasco
        http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/76404381.html

  19. crumbcake says:

    Just wanted to add my $0.02 worth–my parents both have darker hair and when I was a child, my hair was very similar in color to Natalie’s son–a slightly reddish blond. As I got older, it gradually got darker. By the time I was 13 yrs old, it was a medium brown with a bit of an auburn shade to it. It’s not unusual at all to have a fair haired child if both parents have darker hair–my mom had white-blond hair (tow-head) when she was a child which also darkened with age.
    Anyways, Natalie’s son is a cutie!

  20. JustaGirl says:

    I don’t think his coloring is all that strange. My mom has very dark brown hair, and my dad has black hair. My brother and I were both white blond as toddlers/kids, but our hair started darkening as we got older. We both have light brown hair now.

    My sons also had white blond hair, and as they’ve gotten older, their hair has turned a darker blonde color also. I think they’ll end up dark blonde (like their dad) or light brown like me.

  21. Wd says:

    Such a cute baby…unlike those foreign imports that Hollywood has a strange affection for.

    • Ms.Smurf says:

      That’s such a lovely thing to say about people adopting children in need. I hope you don’t have any kids, let alone adopted ones.

      • the original bellaluna says:

        Ms.Smurf – I responded to you on the Denise Richards thread yesterday.

    • Emily says:

      One of my cousins is a “foreign import” who is drop-dead gorgeous. You would probably think she is ugly, though, since not only is she not blonde nor blue-eyed, but her skin is very dark brown. Sit down.

  22. Bread and Circuses says:

    Eh, it’s not so weird. My parents both have dark hair, but we kids all started out as extreme platinum blondes.

    My mom jokes we were all bald until we were three, but really, we just had extremely fine, transparent hair.

    We all darkened to brunette by our early teens.

  23. mimi says:

    She looks great. and I had no idea her hair is so lovely. Really soft and girly curls.

  24. Sohila says:

    Jane got a Gun won’t happen. Sorry Natalie. Used to be a huge Portman fan until 2011.
    I think all these people leaving must have something to do with her. I mean Yes Natalie is a big star, but she isn’t Angelina Jolie or Charlize Theron level of stardom. And she isn’t the only prodcuer too. So what is going on?
    Ewan is probably going to drop out soon.
    Apparently even Tobey Maguire and Joseph-Gordon Leviit were also considered but it didn’t happen.
    BTW, how come we never see Ballet K-fed helping her?

  25. Sohila says:

    Oh wait, wasn’t there another post that Ballet-K fed was annoyed by Natalie working with all these talented, great looking men and he was jealous? I bet Natalie is listening to Ballet-Fed and he is involving himself in this. Thats why everyone is leaving. I bet he wants an acting role lol. He strikes me a fame-seeker.

  26. Mindy says:

    Okay.. This is messed up. I could care less about the movie..but.. Alef? Okay, my husband went to high school with Darren Aronofsky – and they didn’t like each other at all because they LOOKED ALIKE and were constantly being confused for one another. Anyway… Alef looks like my oldest son did at 2.