Natalie Portman Won't Show Her Son the "Star Wars" Prequels

During a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Natalie Portman revealed she hasn’t let her five-year-old son watch the three Star Wars movies she starred in, even though her son is a huge fan of the franchise. And, while this news sets up about a half-dozen different possible smart-ass punchlines, her reasoning has nothing to do with the relative merits of the prequel trilogy.

“Yeah, it’s kind of a shame, because when I made it I was like, ‘This is going to be the coolest thing one day when I have kids, I can show them,’” said Portman. “Then I realized, I die in the movies. So I feel like it’s kind of a scary thing to show your kid.”

As Hitfix points out, it’s not just that Portman’s Padme dies during the prequels, it’s that she dies in childbirth, which has the potential to be all sorts of traumatizing for her actual son. So not only did the decision to have Padme die in Revenge of the Sith create a continuity error with Leia’s apparent memories of her in Return of the Jedi — something our finest YouTubers have been working hard to resolve — it also made it just that extra layer of awful for Portman to share the movie with her son.

And while all this still technically leaves The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones as perfectly fine to watch, that doesn’t alter the fact that they’re, well, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Then again, surely Portman has the kind of resources necessary to make Revenge of the Sith more progeny-friendly. This kind of technology ought to do it.