A moody black-and-white cover shoot for V Magazine casts Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in an alluring but unstable light that seems to mirror the tone of their latest movie, Die My Love, which debuted in theaters on November 7. The morbid romedy was directed by acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, whose 2017 movie You Were Never Really Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatized veteran, earned a Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Based on a 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz, the story follows a mother (Lawrence) struggling with postpartum depression as both she and her husband (Pattinson) spiral into madness.
Not all agree on the degree of Die My Love‘s success—it currently holds a solid 74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critical consensus reading, “A frenzied depiction of a common but oft-ignored experience, Die My Love might be too stylistically mannered to fully connect but gifts Jennifer Lawrence with one of her most vivid roles yet.” Lawrence’s performance is being almost universally hailed as a triumph that could yield her second Best Actress Oscar, following her first win for 2013’s Silver Linings Playbook. If the award is bestowed a second time, count on Lawrence giving thanks in her acceptance speech to Martin Scorsese, who originally envisioned her in the lead role after reading the novel.
“Martin suggested it [and] suggested that I star in it. So I read it that day and in one sitting,” Lawrence said in the V Magazine cover interview. “And as you can see, having just read it, it seems really hard to make it into a movie, because it’s very profound and intense, but it’s all told from the character’s point of view. It’s all in her mind. So I was wondering how that would translate to film. But Lynne Ramsey’s the most poetic director of our time, in my opinion, and so I knew only she could kind of pull something like this off, and I’ve wanted to work with her my entire adult life. So we asked, and then, I mean, I’m still pinching myself that she said yes.
This marked the first time Lawrence had worked with Pattinson, who’s perhaps best known for his titular role in 2022’s acclaimed The Batman but has also shined in more artful flicks, including A24-produced movies Good Time and The Lighthouse. “Rob brought so much more dimension to the film as a whole,” Lawrence said her of her co-star. “He really held firm with this kind of backbone for his character, which gave me so much more to push back against. I’ve never worked with an actor who was really in such a similar place as me in our lives, being new parents, which was so lovely, and also built up natural trust, so that when you had to do these crazy, you know, nude, attacking each other like tigers scenes, there was some sort of added level of trust.”
Pattinson naturally had similarly kind things to say about Lawrence before revealing that she’d offered him the role personally. “I really enjoyed Jennifer. It’s weird—we hadn’t really met very many times before we shot this, which is odd considering how many overlaps there are in our lives. But I’d always wanted to work with her. [Before working on the movie], I was literally talking to her about something else, and she just said, “Oh, by the way, do you want to play my husband in this Lynne Ramsay movie?” And I was like, “What? Why?” Because it wasn’t even on my radar. It was such a strange conversation, and I was in a very strange place in my life at the time, thinking, “Why are there no cool jobs?” She’s a phenomenal actor and so much fun to work around.” Watch the trailer for Die My Love below: