Jennifer Lawrence is looking back at her early days in Hollywood and admitting that she often cringes when she sees her old interviews.
The Oscar-winning actor, who’s been in the spotlight for 15 years, recently told The New Yorker that she has grown hesitant to do press while promoting her films because of how vulnerable it can make her feel.
“Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again,’” Lawrence said, recalling a past conversation with Viola Davis.
“I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.”
When reminded of her old interviews, Lawrence couldn’t help but wince.
“Oh, no. So hyper. So embarrassing,” she said, describing how her personality back then, once seen as refreshingly candid, eventually became the target of public criticism.
The Hunger Games star acknowledged that while her offbeat humour and self-deprecating charm were real, they also served a deeper purpose.
“Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she explained.
“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.”
Grande famously spoofed Lawrence on a 2016 Saturday Night Live sketch, portraying her as an over-the-top version of herself who said things like, “I’m just, like, a snackaholic. I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”
Lawrence admitted that the public’s backlash eventually became unbearable.
“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.
After working non-stop for several years and starring in 16 films over six years, Lawrence decided to step back from Hollywood for a while.
She shared with Vanity Fair in 2021, “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?’”
The actor reflected on her earlier tendency to please people, saying, “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.”
Now, after taking time to reset, Lawrence says she’s at peace with where she stands.
During a recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show, she explained that stepping away from Hollywood helped her find balance.
“It’s a lot,” she said. “I think I would have been [okay], but also I would’ve been really upset. I don’t know.”
Lawrence has returned to promoting her latest project, Die My Love, a psychodrama directed by Lynne Ramsay and co-starring Robert Pattinson.
The film, which had its world premiere at Cannes, follows a woman struggling to balance marriage and motherhood as her life begins to unravel.
The movie came to Lawrence after Martin Scorsese encouraged her to take on the challenge.
He told her, “‘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.’”
Die My Love will be released in theaters on November 7 by Mubi.