Jennifer Lawrence has addressed her public image in a new interview, admitting she found her persona in interviews “annoying” at the height of her fame.
Breaking through in 2011 with the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone, Lawrence became an A-lister thanks to blockbusters such as The Hunger Games and X-Men franchises, and won numerous awards for Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle.
She became known for unguarded, frank interviews, which at first endeared her to the public, but soon prompted backlash due to accusations of the persona being “fake”. In a new profile by The New Yorker, the actor confessed finding interviews stressful.
“Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again’” Lawrence recalled, telling Viola Davis: “I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.”
When discussing past interviews, she reacted: “Oh, no. So hyper. So embarrassing.”
On the topic of her being ‘fake’, she insisted: “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defence mechanism. And so it was a defence mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’”
She added: “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.”
The impression she was referring to was a 2016 episode of Saturday Night Live where the singer and Wicked star impersonated Lawrence, mocking her repeated insistence that she is a normal person during a sketch set on a game show.
“They told me not to do a game show, but I was like, ‘Screw it, I can have fun. I’m a regular person,’” Grande’s Lawrence said. In reply, co-star Kenan Thompson, playing host Steve Harvey, joked: “You know, you say you a regular person mora than any regular person I know.”
When looking back on the backlash against her, the star said: “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.”
Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen on November 7 with Die My Love, a drama co-starring Robert Pattinson that NME’s Lou Thomas described as an “Oscars shoo-in”.
In September, she public condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza, remarking: “What’s happening is no less than a genocide.”