Jennifer Lawrence opened up about her hesitancy about speaking to the press during an interview with The New Yorker published Monday.
Lawrence, who has been been in the public spotlight since her teens, recalled a conversation with fellow-actor Viola Davis a few years prior. “Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again,’” Lawrence recalled telling Davis at the time, adding, “I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.”
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The Oscar winner was 19 when she landed her breakthrough role in Debra Granik’s film adaptation of Winter’s Bone and would go on to feature in a series of successful films including her role as Katniss Everdeen in the blockbuster franchise, The Hunger Games, and David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook (for which she took home the Academy Award for Best Actress). She soon became just as known for her self-deprecating personality when speaking to the press, and when accepting her Oscar for Best Actress in 2013, Lawrence tripped while walking up the stairs toward the stage — a moment that seemed to cement her status as the forever relatable “cool girl.” Yet when she tripped while walking the red carpet at the ceremony a year later, many questioned if it was all an act, and the public’s obsession over her candid demeanor began to sour.
When looking back at this time in her life, Lawrence told The New Yorker, “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she said. “I was young, I lived alone, I was being chased,” she said, referring to the rapid paparazzi that would document her every move, noting that at the time she felt “pissed.”
“That person is annoying,” said Lawrence when referring to old interviews. “I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on S.N.L. was spot-on.” (In the bit, Grande does an impression of Lawrence during a Celebrity Family Feud sketch, and quips, “I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”) Lawrence says the public turning on her made her life feel “uninhabitable.” She continued, “I felt—I didn’t feel, I was, I think—rejected not for my movies, not for my politics, but for me, for my personality.”
Lawrence has addressed her two-year break from Hollywood in the past, telling Vanity Fair in 2021: “I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right. If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’”
She has since returned to the silver screen and co-stars in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love alongside Robert Pattinson. The film, which is based on the 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz of the same name and is produced by Martin Scorsese, debuts in theaters on Nov. 7.
“It was one of the more divisive films to play at Cannes this year, to say the least — but everything you’ve heard about Lawrence’s go-for-broke performance is indeed true,” Rolling Stone critic David Fear wrote about the upcoming film — one of the most anticipated movies of the fall. “Unhinged doesn’t begin to cover it.”
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