Hi everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to work in progress, where I talk to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going.

Today on work in progress, I am ecstatic to share my conversation with one of the most amazing women that I have come to know. She is massively talented, incredibly principled, and very open about being on an ever-evolving journey.

Today's guest is Ms. Natalie Portman. Natalie is known worldwide as an Academy Award-winning actress, director, producer, and activist. Born in Israel, she immigrated to the U.S. with her parents at the age of three and began auditioning when her family moved to New York.

After her debut in Leon the Professional at age 12, Natalie has gone on to star in over 40 films, but Natalie's farm wore than a talented and successful actress. She's used her platform for extensive advocacy and activism, championing causes like times up, and me too, animal rights, protecting the environment, black lives matter, and many more.

And if that wasn't all impressive enough, Natalie recently published Natalie Portman's book of Fables, which retails classic children's Fables in a more modern and representative light. This woman can truly do it all.

In my conversation with Natalie we discussed the 2020 experience, learning to act by acting, what it's like to go to college when you're already a movie star.

And the unfortunate observation that the world tends to undervalue professions and skills that are stereotypically female.

Natalie also shares how she faces the challenge of being a working mom while still making causes for the time she cares about.

And we also get into our mutual involvement in the Angel City FC, the National Women's Soccer League franchise of which Natalie is a founder.

This conversation was enlightening, fun, and Natalie is a true gem of a human, enjoying.

This has been such a strange year, you know, and all of the years of this administration and what has simultaneously opened up, I think, in society during this time has been intense.

And then the last year, being in the middle of a pandemic, realizing the ways in which we participate in the world and the ways in which we're falling behind in terms of caring for people, it is a lot.

And I wonder how has that experience been for you? You know, you have a family, how are you guys doing in the middle of a global pandemic?

Yeah, I think it's absolutely a time that makes you reassess so much of your values and beliefs.

And of course, your lifestyle, because it has such a real tangible effect on all of us.

And brings you closer to people and the fact that you're sharing this experience, you know, I keep thinking to myself, so much, I don't know, maybe this is strange, but I grew up so much on stories of my family's experience and the Holocaust and the oppression of Europe for Jews.

And I kept being like, obviously, this is an extremely different situation, but is there something different about it being like a universal, difficult experience versus like you're targeted because you're in a specific community.

And other people are just like living their lives because right now I feel like it's something that almost, you know, brings community together because we are all going through it together.

So it feels hard, but you also are like, we're all doing this. How can we keep each other inspired? How can we keep, how can we take good energy from people? How can we give good energy to people? And it's definitely an interesting thing to have like everyone suffering at once, you know, that there's like an unusual kind of experience to that relative to, I think, other.

Difficult world events that have happened or that do happen. Yeah, it's, it's less possible to turn away and to say, well, that's something happening over there and, and to think, I don't, I don't have to pay attention to that.

I was really inspired, we interviewed a friend of mine who's a science communicator and an epidemiologist on the podcast last week and she was saying that in the medical community, there's this incredible sort of feeling of phenomenon because they, they've never, ever in the history of modern medicine scene, the entire world work on a vaccine for the same thing at the same time.

Wow. And they made me, they made me feel so much help, you know, to, to be reminded of what we can do when we really come together and act like a human team.

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