Jennifer Lawrence was once known for her uninhibited, gossipy tell-all interviews. It was all Doritos, farts and poop jokes with her. Then she grew up, got married, started a family and… she still likes to joke around, but she’s absolutely matured and her interviews have started to reflect that. She’s currently promoting Die My Love, and I think she’s probably going to be a big awards contender for the film. She’s already been making her way through the film festival circuit, and now she’s given her first big interview of the season to the New Yorker. It’s a good read – you can see the full piece here. Some highlights:
Her old Cool Girl interviews: “So hyper. So embarrassing. Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she said. The pedestal of fame had felt treacherous and false: “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ I was young, I lived alone, I was being chased,” she said. Paparazzi followed her when she drove around in Los Angeles; at night, adrenaline threw off her sleep. She had too many projects and was doing too much press, and she felt “pissed,” she said. “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 ‘S.N.L.’ was spot-on.” But the backlash did make her life seem “uninhabitable. 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.”
She said yes to ‘Die My Love’ right after she gave birth to her first child: “I wasn’t really having a bad postpartum. I had a worse postpartum with my second, but the first time the only thing I was at war with was the rest of the world.” Still, she responded to the protagonist’s loneliness, to the frankness of her insanity and her lack of control.
They decided to change parts of Grace’s postpartum depression so she was never abusive to her baby: “Maybe that was a mistake. But, once Rob and I started doing our scenes together, I think it became more of a thing that a lot of postpartum women feel, where you’re not mad at your baby—you’re mad at your f–king husband, who can just go to the gym.” The script called for them to have a screaming match in the car with the baby in the back seat. “Rob and I were both, like, ‘We can’t.’ ” They had bonded with the twins who played their son—Lawrence held them a lot off camera, so that they would feel safe when she held them onscreen. (“Those babies,” Lawrence said, in a worshipful hush. “Victoria and Kennedy. The girls.”) Grace and Jackson had their fight alone, and Grace is never cruel to the child. “I think if there was a baby on my lap, I can’t hold her in a way that she’s not going to feel like I like her. That would be so, so sad.”
The terrible postpartum anxiety she’d experienced with her second. “I just thought every time he was sleeping he was dead. I thought he cried because he didn’t like his life, or me, or his family. I thought I was doing everything wrong, and that I would ruin my children.” She took Zurzuvae, a recently developed drug, and it helped so quickly and significantly that she thinks all new moms should be briefed about it.
Her first big job on “The Bill Engvall Show”: “It was perfect,” Lawrence said, of the show’s utter lack of cultural resonance, “because I didn’t get pigeonholed, and I had a steady paycheck, which meant I could actually choose my roles.”
How she deals with paparazzi now: Paparazzi regularly station themselves outside her town house downtown. Once she had kids, Lawrence decided to make herself an easy target. “It’s better than the cat-and-mouse thing where I’m going into garages and my eyes are darting around and I wonder if someone’s chasing me,” she said. “I realized that my kids would be aware of my energy, and that, if I was nervous and pissed when we left the house, they would feel that in their little bodies.” Now she goes out the front door, the paparazzi take pictures, and then they let her be for the rest of the day.
She’s getting a boob job this year: “Everything bounced back, pretty much, after the first one. Second one, nothing bounced back.” She has to be nude on camera again in the spring, one year postpartum, she told me. Would she be getting them done if she weren’t a famous actress? “Maybe I wouldn’t be hustling to the appointment in the same way,” she said. “But I think yes.”
Re: the cool-girl interviews of her 20s, she was annoying and hyper and there was too much gross-out humor, but you have to keep in mind, for a seven-year period, absolutely no one was doing it like her. She was the biggest star in the country, and she was being offered everything under the sun. Of course she had a shtick and she stuck with it for a while. Maybe too long. But you live and you learn, and she really needs to give herself a break. She wasn’t committing crimes, she was just a bit annoying in interviews.
I’m not surprised that she talks openly about getting a boob job either – what surprises me is that she’s not talking about how she’s tweaked her face a bit! But whatever, it’s fine. I’m looking forward to her awards season. I’ve got to wonder if she wants to have new boobs for all of the awards shows too.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
