Copyright independent
Jennifer Lawrence understands why she was rejected by the public in the early years of her career, admitting that she, too, finds her behavior in old interviews “annoying.” Now 35, Lawrence was just 20 when she first gained recognition for her breakout role in the 2010 thriller-mystery Winter’s Bone. Two years later, she shot to global fame for her leading performance as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise. While fans initially found the Oscar-winning Silver Linings Playbook star’s off-the-cuff disposition endearing, it didn’t take long for the internet to turn on her and accuse her of being fake. In a new interview with The New Yorker, Lawrence cringed at her past “hyper” and “embarrassing” personality in old press junkets, saying: “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism.” She explained that her bluntness came through as a way to navigate fame. “It was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’” Lawrence said. “I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying,” she acknowledged. “Ariana Grande’s impression of me on SNL was spot-on,” she said, referencing Grande’s 2018 parody of her. “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 added. Lawrence, who, in November returns to the screen in the new psycho-drama Die My Love after a two-year hiatus, addressed her retreat from the spotlight. Asked on The Graham Norton Show last week whether she was worried she might have a difficult time making a career comeback, she said, “I was at peace with the possibility of that happening. [Hollywood] is a lot… I think I would have been [okay], but also I would’ve been really upset. I don’t know.” At the height of her early career, Lawrence starred in an astounding 16 movies in six years, a majority of which were box office flops. “I was not pumping out the quality that I should have,” she confessed to Vanity Fair in 2021, adding that she thought “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,” Lawrence said. “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.”
