Jennifer Lawrence recently told The New Yorker that she is hesitant to speak to the press while promoting her movies. The Oscar winner has been a tabloid fixture for 15 years and once told fellow actor Viola Davis: “Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again.’ I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.”
When the subject of Lawrence’s old interviews came up, the actor winced and said: “Oh, no. So hyper. So embarrassing.” While the public initially loved Lawrence for her candid, self-deprecating personality, perception of her online eventually soured with claims that it was all fake.
“Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” Lawrence said about being so off the cuff in interviews. “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ … I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on ‘SNL’ was spot-on.”
In a “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch from 2016, “SNL” mocked Lawrence by having Grande say lines such as “I’m just, like, a snackaholic. I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”
The public backlash against Lawrence became “uninhabitable,” she told The New Yorker, adding: “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 been open in past interviews about needing to take a two year break from Hollywood after making 16 movies in six years, a string of which flopped at the box office and only inflamed the public’s negative reception of her. She told 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?’”
Lawrence continued, “I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.”
In a recent interview on “The Graham Norton Show,” Lawrence revealed she “was at peace” with her decision to remain out of Hollywood. She added: [Hollywood] is a lot. … I think I would have been [okay], but also I would’ve been really upset. I don’t know.”
Lawrence is now back doing press for “Die My Love,” a psychodrama co-starring Robert Pattinson from director Lynne Ramsay. The film, which stars Lawrence as a woman whose life spirals as she balances marriage and motherhood, had its world premiere at Cannes earlier this year. Martin Scorsese personally courted Lawrence to headline the movie after he read the novel of the same name and thought it would be a great movie. The duo was considering adapting Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel “The Awakening” into a movie, but Scorsese didn’t think it’d be enough of a challenge for Lawrence.
“I said, ‘You know what? This is a challenge,’” Scorsese told Lawrence. “‘This is the kind of thing you should be doing. Go take a chance. Knock any sense of a comfortable character off the board and just go for it.’”
Mubi is releasing “Die My Love” in theaters Nov. 7. Head over to The New Yorker’s website to read Lawrence’s latest profile in its entirety,
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