Clarity always follows with the benefit of hindsight. With Jennifer Lawrence, it helped her comprehend why the public chose to reject her despite her self-deprecating humor.
In conversation with The New Yorker, she confided that she was quite sheepish speaking to the press while promoting her movies. Having been a tabloid fixture for 15 years, according to Variety, the 35-year-old actress 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.”
While talking about her past interviews, the Mother actress turned red with embarrassment and exclaimed, “Oh, no. So hyper. So embarrassing.” Variety noted that despite the public loving Lawrence’s candid personality, which was expressed through her self-deprecating humor, her perception online gradually changed, deeming that it was all fake.
Clearing the air around this perception, Lawrence revealed, “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism. 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.”
According to Variety, SNL mocked Lawrence by having Ariana 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” in a “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch from 2016.
Talking about being on the receiving end of the public backlash and admitting how it became “uninhabitable”, the Hunger Games actress added, “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.”
The public’s sour perception of Lawrence has also something to do with a string of flops on her head, considering that she did 16 movies in 6 years. The actress has reportedly been open about needing to take a two-year break from Hollywood as a result of her turbulent journey.
Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2021, Lawrence said, “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?’”
Divulging her innermost feelings during this rough patch in her life, the actress 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.”
Recently, when the actress appeared on The Graham Norton Show, she revealed that she “was at peace” with her decision to stay away from Hollywood.
“[Hollywood] is a lot. … I think I would have been [okay], but also I would’ve been really upset. I don’t know”, she said.
Nevertheless, the actress seemed to wear her acting hat once again for her latest movie, Die My Love, a psychodrama co-starring Robert Pattinson from director Lynne Ramsay, for which she’s been doing the press. The film, starring Lawrence in the lead role, revolves around a woman who is trying to balance marriage and motherhood simultaneously.
Having its world premiere at Cannes earlier this year, Martin Scorsese reportedly courted Lawrence to headline this movie after reading the novel. He believed that it would be a great movie, in comparison to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which the duo initially considered for the adaptation. However, the filmmaker thought that the latter wouldn’t be much of a challenge.
Speaking to Lawrence, Scorsese said, “I said, ‘You know what? This is a challenge. 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.'”