Jennifer Lawrence is peeling back the curtain on why she’s grown to not be so fond of speaking with the press.
During an interview with The New Yorker, the Die My Love star recalled telling 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.”
The interviewee later brought up the topic of Lawrence’s past articles, to which she responded, “Oh, no. So hyper. So embarrassing.” The Oscar winner was once loved by fans due to her quirky, authentic nature, though online sentiment somewhat turned on her, with some claiming her personality was faux.
“Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” Lawrence said. “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’”
She cited Ariana Grande’s 2016 impersonation of herself on Saturday Night Live as a time she found herself “annoying.”
“I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying,” she added. “I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on SNL was spot-on.”
Still, Lawrence said the backlash made things feel “uninhabitable,” noting she felt “rejected” for her own “personality” at the time.
“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 explained. The Hunger Games actress has been candid in discussing the evolution of her career, and revealed that she parted ways with her former agency, CAA, as she felt she was viewed more as a “celebrity than an actor” and was “cut off from my creativity, my imagination.”
“I found out that a lot of filmmakers that I really loved and admired had scripts that weren’t even reaching me,” Lawrence told The New York Times in 2022. “I had let myself be hijacked.”
During The Hollywood Reporter’s 2022 actress roundtable, Lawrence addressed on feeling “hijacked” in her career, noting that she was with a “big agency” but also felt like she “was just losing touch with the world a little bit.”
“I was working so much, and so much of what we do has to do with observing people. I felt like I couldn’t really observe anyone because everybody was observing me,” she explained. “And so, taking a few years and getting back to life, I feel like I can be creative again in that sense.”
