P for Portman, publicity

When the title character wears a plastic mask every minute that he is on screen and you have a beautiful female lead, well, it’s a no-brainer that Natalie Portman is the face for “V for Vendetta,” the dark Orwellian suspense film that hits theaters Friday and is getting promising early reviews.

Warner Bros., which is distributing the film, needs Portman to play a pivotal role in selling “Vendetta,” both to the genre fans who are devoted to the 1980s-era comic-book source material and to general-audience moviegoers who may connect with the story’s questions about terrorism and government oppression.

The film has a first-time director, James McTeigue, and the screenplay is by the Wachowski brothers, the sibling tandem famed for the “Matrix” trilogy, but not exactly front and center when it comes to publicity. The male lead is Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith of “The Matrix”), but he came in late to the production and replaced James Purefoy (who actually is the man in the mask in some portions of the film).

“She is certainly the recognizable face of the movie,” said Dawn Taubin, Warner Bros.’ president of domestic marketing. “She is also an incredibly articulate person and can talk about the movie in a really good way.”

New posters for the film have an image of Portman’s face that is more prominent and recognizable than earlier ones, and the actress herself has been a trouper flying the film’s flag. She had a memorable and ribald recent “Saturday Night Live” skit as a gangsta rapper that was making the Internet rounds over the weekend, a week after its airing. Portman, a Jerusalem native, also was a surprise guest lecturer at a Columbia University class in terrorism while MTV-U cameras followed her.

She also attended the “Vendetta” premiere in London and, last summer, began the campaign by dropping in on the International Comic-Con in San Diego, where fans revere her for her role as Amidala in the “Star Wars” films.

Beautiful actresses get plenty of JPEG attention from genre fan-boys, but that doesn’t always translate to big-screen success for sci-fi films that bank on a female lead; Charlize Theron was also at Comic-Con last summer to promote her own antihero comic-book thriller, “Aeon Flux,” which flopped at the box office. Similarly, Scarlett Johansson was not enough to float “The Island” with the notoriously finicky sci-fi core fans.

For the genre fans, there’s also some Internet stunts (such as video feeds that tie in visually to the fascist subplots of the film) and a “wild posting” campaign that will promote the film with images that resemble Soviet style propaganda art more than traditional Hollywood ads.

“The movie works as a sophisticated, thinking-person’s movie and as an action movie,” Taubin said. “So we are marketing it in both ways.... Part of the campaign is for fans of the Wachowskis, ‘The Matrix’ and comic-book action movies. And another part of the campaign is that there are some people walking away from the movie with messages and thoughts about politics and social issues.”