"What a cool role model to have--this girl who's 14, running a planet, and doing well."

"I'm, like, addicted to chocolate," says the girl who would be Queen Amidala, mother of Luke and Leia, and defender of planet Naboo, in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Sitting in the lobby of Manhattan's posh Four Seasons hotel, Natalie Portman tears into a Hershey's bar, ignoring the gourmet cookies sitting daintily on a dish nearby. She is seventeen years old. She is wearing black sneakers. She is not wearing makeup. She looks--to use a Portman word--normal. But then by her definition, director George Lucas is "normal," as is her drive to succeed. Only a few years after Portman told her modeling agency (she was discovered by a Revlon rep in a pizza parlor) that she'd prefer acting, the Israeli-born, Long Island-raised honors student is about to star in the movie event of the decade. Normal, it seems, is anything but.

Portman made her film debut as a feisty orphan in 1994's The Professional, broke hearts as a precocious preteen in Beautiful Girls, and went on to star in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, and Broadway's Anne Frank (next up is this fall's Anywhere But Here). Somewhere in the middle of all this, her phone rang. "They said they were doing a new Star Wars, and I was like, yeah, okay, whatever," Portman recalls. She had never really seen a Star Wars movie. Only when Lucas summoned her, several months later, to his Skywalker Ranch to pop the casting question did she finally pop in a tape.

Still, she waffled. "It was a huge commitment," Portman says. Not only had Lucas not finished the script, but at fourteen, she was facing a three-film contract that carried a nearly ten-year obligation. ("And I still don't know if acting is what I want to do for the rest of my life," she says.) What's more, the part of the teenage Anakin Skywalker, her love interest in the second film, was (and remains) uncast. And then there was the little detail about how her life would never be the same again. "I've had a cool career so far because I've been able to do things that I'm proud of, but no one recognizes me on the street," Portman explains. "Giving that up, which will inevitably happen when the movie comes out, was a big thing to think about. But then I thought, You know what? This is gonna be fun!"

The London portion of the shoot, however, was hardly summer camp. "I kind of envisioned everyone being in the same hotel--playing and hanging out," she says. "But Ewan and Liam have wives and kids. And Jake was only eight." Lucas finally took pity on her and flew in one of her friends from New York. Then there was the "accident thing" involving a small explosive charge that was unintentionally detonated in Portman's face during a running scene, blasting debris into her eye. Lucas was mortified. The technician was dismissed. "I'd always been treated like a kid on sets," Portman says. "Now I was, like, an adult, and I kind of wasn't ready for it. It's a big mind change."