Jennifer Lawrence: “I Didn’t Have a Life. I Thought I Should Go Get One”
Her computer sits atop a stack of boxes, angled for this September morning’s stint in Zoom prison so that her pregnant belly is out of sight. There’s a scratching at the door behind her. No fool, her cat Frank, otherwise known as Fredericks, doesn’t want any part of this and is trying to get out.
Told to blink twice if she needs rescuing, Lawrence laughs. She and her husband of two years, art gallery director Cooke Maroney, are in a rental while their Manhattan town house is under construction.
The austerity of the room feels staged to discourage any unwanted probing. So urgent is Lawrence’s desire for privacy that she recently gave up her beloved dog, Pippi. The paparazzi had come to count on their daily walks in Central Park, so now the dog can chase squirrels unbothered on her parents’ farm in Kentucky, and Lawrence fantasizes about a life with 15 cats.
“I’m so nervous,” she says at the start of our conversation. “I haven’t spoken to the world in forever. And to come back now, when I have all of these new accessories added to my life that I obviously want to protect….” She crosses her arms over her baggy gray sweater.
“I’m nervous for you. I’m nervous for me. I’m nervous for the readers!”
After a long break from public life, Lawrence returns to the screen in Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy Don’t Look Up, in which she and Leonardo DiCaprio play scientists screaming at a polarized society to take seriously the comet hurtling toward the planet. It’s her first comedy, and the timing of stepping back into the spotlight while pregnant with her first child is almost comedic.
By early 2018, Lawrence was one of the highest paid actors in the world—an Oscar winner who stumbled up the steps on the way to collect the trophy, further cementing her public image as the movie star you’d most like to chug a beer with—but she’d had enough.
Her last four movies (Passengers, Mother!, Red Sparrow, and the 12th X-Men film, Dark Phoenix) turned out to be critical or box office disappointments. “I was not pumping out the quality that I should have,” she says, a sad statement for someone so fiercely talented. “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?’… I think that 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.”
Lawrence’s producing partner and best friend of 13 years, Justine Polsky, says: “The protocol of stardom began to kill her creative spirit, to fuck with her compass. So, she vanished, which was probably the most responsible way to protect her gifts. And sanity.”
Ifirst met Lawrence when she was 20, freshly cast as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise. While sweating through an archery lesson in Santa Monica, she told me she hoped to work with Adam McKay one day because she was obsessed with his Will Ferrell comedies.
So much so that at 19, just before her first Oscar nomination, she’d requested a meeting with McKay at his Funny or Die offices and showed up with a binder of notes on his movies. “I got this call that the wonderful actress from Winter’s Bone wanted to meet me,” says McKay. “And she came in and just for an hour we talked about Step Brothers. And I’m like, ‘I like her. We’re idiots too.’ ”
All those years ago, Lawrence also told me that she knew she wanted to be a mom. After she first moved to Los Angeles as a 15-year-old auditioning actor, she got a job nannying for a family with a nine-month-old baby. When she booked a sitcom, she was devastated that, after being there for the little girl’s first words, she would miss her first steps.
Opportunity comes at a price. You could already see a second skin of self-deprecation and self-consciousness taking hold of the young actor. “I don’t want to offend anyone,” Lawrence told me back then. “I don’t want to look stupid. I don’t want to be a douchebag. Part of me is like ‘Enh, fuck it.’ And then, every once in a while, I’m like, ‘God, I’m a loser.’ You think that’ll go away when I’m 30?”
“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.”
Lawrence is now 31 and entering a season of full-circle abundance.
She’s working with her heroes, and she’s going to be a mother, though her feelings around expecting, other than saying that she’s grateful and excited, are too sacred to share with the world: “If I was at a dinner party, and somebody was like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re expecting a baby,’ I wouldn’t be like, ‘God, I can’t talk about that. Get away from me, you psycho!’ But every instinct in my body wants to protect their privacy for the rest of their lives, as much as I can. I don’t want anyone to feel welcome into their existence.
And I feel like that just starts with not including them in this part of my work.”
If anything was clarifying about Lawrence’s time away, it’s that she wants to be more thoughtful with her choices and words and less of a people pleaser, however excruciating she finds the practice of restraint.
She excuses herself to pee when I ask if she uses humor to mask feelings of vulnerability. “It’s just going to be one second, I promise I’m going to answer the question!” She shuffles around the corner to the bathroom. When she returns, she’s laughing and shaking her head. “I really wish I’d muted the recording. I was so self-conscious the whole time, thinking to myself, Can she hear this?”
This boundary business is going to be hard.
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