Jennifer Lawrence recently revealed that she’s become increasingly cautious about speaking to the press while promoting her films.
The Oscar-winning actor, who has been a fixture of celebrity culture for over 15 years, admitted that media interactions often leave her feeling drained. She 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 asked about her older interviews, Lawrence visibly cringed. “Oh, no. So hyper. So embarrassing,” she said. The public initially adored her for her unfiltered, self-deprecating charm, but over time, online sentiment shifted, with critics accusing her of being disingenuous.
“Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” Lawrence explained when reflecting on her outspoken interview style.
“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 2016 “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch, SNL spoofed Lawrence’s persona, with Grande portraying her and joking, “I’m just, like, a snackaholic. I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”
The backlash that followed became “uninhabitable,” Lawrence told. “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 previously spoken about taking a two-year hiatus from Hollywood after an exhausting six-year stretch during which she made 16 films.
Several underperformed at the box office, amplifying the public’s growing fatigue with her. In a 2021 interview, she admitted, “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 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 more recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Lawrence shared that she has since found peace in stepping back from the industry. “I was at peace,” she said of her time away. “[Hollywood] is a lot. I think I would have been [okay], but also I would’ve been really upset. I don’t know.”
Now, Lawrence is back in the spotlight promoting Die My Love, a psychological drama directed by Lynne Ramsay and co-starring Robert Pattinson. The film, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, follows a woman whose life unravels as she struggles to balance marriage and motherhood.
The project came about after Martin Scorsese approached Lawrence about starring in an adaptation of the novel. Scorsese had initially considered her for an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening but ultimately felt it wouldn’t challenge her enough.
“I said, ‘You know what? This is a challenge,’” Scorsese recalled telling 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 will release Die My Love in theaters on November 7. To read Jennifer Lawrence’s full profile, visit The New Yorker’s website.