The Lyrics of Natalie Portman’s ‘SNL’ Rap Were Cited as Fact in a Newspaper Article About Her

When Natalie Portman hosted Saturday Night Live for the very first time back in 2006, she poked fun at Star Wars fans during her opening monologue, and took a crack at telling the “Aristocrats” joke on Weekend Update. But it was the episode’s Digital Short that proved to be the most memorable moment in the entire show, by far.

“Natalie’s Rap” found the young actress teaming up with the Lonely Island for a “mindbogglingly, graphically filthy” hip-hop track in which she promoted drunk driving, dropped innumerable F-bombs and threatened to “slit your throat and pour nitrous down the hole.” 

Just imagine how much more entertaining the Star Wars prequels would have been if she had been allowed to slip into this character from time to time.

The video was a huge hit with audiences, so much so that it inspired Portman to star in a follow-up, “Natalie’s Rap 2,” when she hosted again in 2018. The sequel tried to up the ante by giving Portman a dildo-switchblade and having her drown her obstetrician with a firehose-like spray of amniotic fluid. 

But perhaps the greatest testament to this sketch’s cultural ubiquity is the fact that some of its offensive lyrics were just unironically cited as fact in a wildly suspicious article published by The Daily Mail.

The U.K.-based paper isn’t exactly known for its journalistic integrity, yet eyebrows were still raised when its hard-hitting piece about the “surprising celebrities who still smoke cigarettes” mentioned the fact that Portman “was big into weed and cocaine while she was at college.” Their evidence was one of Portman’s previous statements: “I smoked weed every day. I cheated every test and snorted all the yay.”

Did Portman give an interview confessing to academic fraud and excessive drug use in the style of Dr. Seuss? No, of course not. This was just a line from the SNL video, misappropriated as fact, leading people to suspect that the article was A.I.-generated. This hasn’t been officially confirmed, but come on…

The quote was subsequently deleted from the article, although the allegations of cocaine use are still up. Why would A.I. think that lyrics from a rap song written by the “Jizz in My Pants” guys were a legitimate source to pull from? Probably because those same lyrics showed up in a 2011 profile of Portman in The Observer, which followed the quote with this statement: “Thankfully, or not, she was having us on. The lines come from a self-mocking, foul-mouthed gangsta rap she performed for the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live.”

So presumably, the A.I. yanked the initial statement from the Observer piece but failed to recognize that it was contextualized as a parody in the next paragraph. Why? Because it’s not a human being, and probably shouldn’t be writing news articles to begin with. Stay in your lane, A.I. You don’t see us writers trying to hunt down and kill John Conner.

In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for any Daily Mail coverage about famous Jack Sparrow enthusiast Michael Bolton.

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