It is a 2006 film set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The film has strong torture scenes that Natalie Portman partly regrets.
The film Goya's Ghosts (2006) is one of the darkest films in Natalie Portman's filmography. The film tells the story of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya and is set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
The film reviews the origin of some of Goya's most brutal paintings, in which he portrayed the torture of innocents during that historical period. The harshest paintings were created between 1819 and 1823 and portray the brutal martyrdoms of Napoleon's soldiers on the Spanish people during that period of conquest.
The film tells the story of Goya (played by Stellan Skarsgard), who becomes involved in a major s- when his teenage muse (Natalie Portman) is accused of heresy by an important member of the Inquisition, Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem).
In one of the toughest scenes in the film, Brother Lorenzo tortures Inés (Natalie Portman) by tying her hands and suspending her body in the air with a rope. The practice is known as garrucha (trappado), it was used in Spain and Italy and generally caused the dislocation of the victim's arms.
The scene in question is very difficult to see and in it, the character played by Portman is forced to remove all her clothes. When the film was released, Portman clarified in several interviews that she used a body double to film the scene and that she was not the one who appeared unclothed in the film.
"There are some scenes where I'm without clothes, but it's not me and I hope they don't end up somewhere saying it's me because I'm going to get pretty angry," Portman said at the time.
When asked if she regretted having been in Goya's Ghosts, Portman clarified that it actually bothered her that "people lied about it." "It's not cool when you create something as part of a story and then it ends up on an adult site. It was a dramatic scene that was part of the story. It makes me angry that it's used for other things," the actress explained.
