Natalie Portman’s Steamy ‘Lady in the Lake’ Mirror Sex Scene Takes Us Through the Looking Glass

Filmmakers love putting Natalie Portman’s face in the mirror. It’s easy to understand — if I were a director who had access to a face like Natalie Portman’s, I’d put it everywhere I could. But like Perseus defeating Medusa by her reflection in his shield, there are some faces simply too powerful to gaze at directly for too long. Studying such a striking person from that reflective remove can be more revealing than looking at them directly. 

It certainly is in Episode 3 of Lady in the Lake. Adapted from the novel by Laura Lipmman, Alma Har’el’s Apple TV+ series stages this sex scene involving Portman’s character, fed-up ex-housewife turned cub reporter Maddie Morgenstern Schwartz, and her lover, Baltimore police officer Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel), in front of a mirror. And there’s a lot to see. 

Portman’s most memorable performances often feature her as a performer: a stripper in Closer, an actor in May December, a ballet dancer in Black Swan, a rock star in Vox Lux, a queen pretending to be her own servant in The Phantom Menace. The mirror is the place where the performer considers her own performance. In May December, it’s where she tries on Julianne Moore’s hairstyle and facial expressions for size. In Black Swan, it’s where her shadow-self doppelgänger emerges. It’s the dividing line between who you are and who you act like you are.

Maddie Morgenstern Schwartz — one of Lady in the Lake’s twinned protagonists with Moses Ingram’s mom-slash-moll Cleo Johnson — is not in the business they call show, but she’s been performing her whole life. She hid years of boredom, frustration, and resentment over suppressing her dreams of becoming a writer to be a homemaker, for a man whose only redeeming quality seems to be reliability, like a good car in an ugly color. She’s been suppressing a troubled past with the Dursts, the wealthy Jewish family whose murdered daughter’s body she helps recover. And whether it’s related to the Dursts or not, we learn this episode that she’s been pretending her husband Milton (Brett Gelman) is the father of her son Seth (Noah Jupe), the boy’s entire life, when in fact it’s a man whose name she didn’t even write down in her diary.

So when writer Briana Belser and creator/director Har’el stage Maddie and Ferdie’s Episode 3 sex scene, one even more scorching than their first, in front of Maddie’s bathroom mirror, they’re making a point. Several, in fact. One of them is that Natalie Portman is an extremely good-looking woman, of course; from Portman to Ingram to Noel to Jennifer Mogbock as the brilliant junkie soul singer Dora Carter and beyond, Har’el is very good at making her attractive cast look like they could stop traffic. (This is easier in Noel’s case given his police uniform, but still.)

But it’s not just Portman who looks that good. It’s Maddie. The mirror is where she chooses to wait for her man as he sneaks in through her window like a catburglar, the cold air blowing through the curtains and sending stray snowflakes into the apartment. It’s where she stands in a gorgeous slip and nothing else, knowing he’ll find her that way, knowing she’s going to cross her wrists behind her back like she’s his prisoner, knowing how he’ll give it to her when he finds her that way. That whole time she waits for him there is like a rehearsal for the sexual performance she’s about to put on, not just for his benefit but for her own.

The sex itself plays out in front of the mirror too, as she knew it would, as she wanted it to. When was the last time you think Maddie and Milton had sex with the lights on, much less in front of a reflective surface capable of showing her her own pleasure in real time? Her tousled hair, her undulating body, his hand over her open mouth: She gets to watch it too, not just the audience. She gets to enjoy a look at the woman she’s become since she threw away the life she’d known.

And after it’s all over — the rehearsal, the performance, the grand finale — the mirror is still there. It shows her herself as she is now: a beautiful middle-aged woman, estranged from her family, excited about a new life, in a cheap and tiny apartment, flush with the terrific sex she just had with a man who even now is leaving to get back on patrol, not to mention his side of the racial divide. She can see all the flaws and virtues, pros and cons, beauty and ugliness of her situation in a glance into that glass. So can we.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.