Natalie Portman will star in ''Scrubs'' star's movie

He’s not a doctor, but he plays one on TV. She’s not a galactic royal, but she plays one in the ”Star Wars” movies. Now, Variety reports, Natalie Portman is going to join ”Scrubs” star Zach Braff in ”Large’s Ark,” a drama that also marks Braff’s feature film writing/directing debut. The movie will shoot next spring, when production halts on ”Scrubs” for the season, and Portman is done shooting her current project, the adaptation of Charles Frazier’s Civil War bestseller ”Cold Mountain,” in which she costars opposite Jude Law and Nicole Kidman.

The 27-year-old Braff, who stars as a medical student on the NBC sitcom that now has ”Friends” for a lead-in, got his degree in filmmaking at Northwestern University, where he started developing the ”Large” screenplay years ago. ”I play this guy who has been estranged from his family for 10 years, and comes home for the first time for his mother’s funeral,” Braff told Variety. “He has lost every shred of who he was as a person, and the catalyst for his recovery is this young girl he meets when he returns. I always thought Natalie Portman would be perfect, but I never imagined that she would actually say yes.”

Young girl? Portman is 21. Still, Braff’s plot summary recalls another movie, 1996’s ”Beautiful Girls,” in which a high school reunion brings mopey Timothy Hutton home for the first time in ages, where the catalyst for his reawakening is a much younger girl he meets. Playing that girl was the then-14-year-old Natalie Portman.