Natalie Portman Shows Off Her Prep Work For Thor: Love And Thunder

Natalie Portman’s shock return to the MCU was only announced a couple of weeks ago, but the actress is already hard at work preparing for her transformation from Jane Foster into the Goddess of Thunder in Thor: Love and Thunder – by reading a load of comic books.

Portman updated her Instagram Story recently with a short video of a spread of The Mighty Thor comics, captioning it “Werk” and tagging Marvel’s official account. Check it out below, as handily shared by a Twitter user:

Natalie Portman is already preparing
for The Mighty Thor ⚡️🔨#ThorLoveAndThunder pic.twitter.com/oIbj4psOHl

— Cosmic Marvel (@cosmic_marvel) July 31, 2019

Marvel’s Comic-Con panel, which revealed the contents of the MCU’s Phase 4, gave us the news that Portman was returning to the franchise for the first time since 2013’s Thor: The Dark World. She did feature in Avengers: Endgame recently, but that was only via archival footage and a brief bit of background audio she recorded.

In a moment that brought the house down though, the star came on stage and lifted Mjolnir, offering just a taste of what we’ll get in the movie when she becomes the Mighty Thor. We’ve since learned that Portman was drafted in for the film six months ago, with it being writer/director Taika Waititi’s idea to borrow from the recent comics run from Jason Aaron and bring Jane back in order for her to take over from Thor Odinson.

Of course, Portman will have some much tougher prep to do to get into character as Thor than just reading comics. The actress teased in another Instagram post that she’s going to get “jacked” for the role. So expect her to be in the best of Asgardian shape when shooting begins on Love and Thunder in March 2020.

Thor: Love and Thunder is scheduled to thunder into theaters on November 5th, 2021, bringing Phase 4 to close.