“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,” Lawrence told The New Yorker
Jennifer Lawrence is reflecting on the reputation she held earlier in her career for coming across as “annoying” in her interviews.
When Lawrence, 35, spoke with The New Yorker for a profile on her new movie Die My Love, published Monday, Oct. 27, the actress described herself in various interviews she has taken part in throughout her career as “so hyper” and “so embarrassing” when the outlet’s reporter noted she had gone through Lawrence’s old interviews.
“Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she said, in response to the notion that some people thought she was faking what the outlet described as her “cool girl” persona. “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ ”
Lawrence broke out in the early 2010s with movies like Winter’s Bone, The Hunger Games franchise and Silver Linings Playbook, the latter of which earned her an Academy Award by the time she was in her mid-20s. While speaking with The New Yorker, the actress recalled that in the 2010s, paparazzi used to follow her as she drove through Los Angeles and that she felt she was too busy doing too much press for too many projects.
“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,” Lawrence 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.”
As Lawrence referred to in the article, Wicked star Grande, 32, once performed a compelling impression of Lawrence during a 2016 SNL episode in a Celebrity Family Feud sketch that saw Grande’s take on the Hunger Games star refer to herself as “a regular person” throughout. (When Lawrence commented on that sketch during an interview with Vogue in 2017, she described the bit as “spot-f—— on.”)
Even as Lawrence reflected on her past reputation for goofy interview anecdotes, the actress said that right as she left her home to take part in The New Yorker interview, she got her mouth guard stuck in her mouth.
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“Can you imagine?” she said. “After ten years of being, like, ‘I used to be folksy, but everyone thought everything was a shtick,’ then I show up for my first day of this,” she said, pantomiming a clumsy person wearing a mouth guard. “I was, like, I will do anything to prevent this from happening. It would be like if I tripped and fell on my way into the room.”
