Actor Jennifer Lawrence reflected on her famous press tours during her 20s, saying she lost “so much control over” her craft doing press for movies and called her interviews “so embarrassing.”
Lawrence told The New Yorker in a profile published Monday that, a few years ago, she told actor 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.”
She continued, “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism. 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’s impression of Lawrence on a 2018 episode of “SNL” poked fun at Lawrence’s annoying relatability, mocking the actor for eating a whole can of Pringles.
Lawrence told The New Yorker that she felt like she was being rejected from roles for her personality.
YouTube compilations with millions of views show Lawrence, who won an Oscar for her role in “Silver Linings Playbook,” being goofy, tripping at the Oscars, drinking on talk shows, or retelling her most embarrassing moments, like mistakenly thinking she was talking to Elizabeth Taylor when Taylor had been dead for years.
But Lawrence, who is now promoting her new movie with Robert Pattinson, “Die, My Love,” is back working following a few years off after she said she felt like everybody had “gotten sick” of her.
“I just think everybody had gotten sick of me,” Lawrence told Vanity Fair in 2021. “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. 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.”
Lawrence told Stephen Colbert in 2021 on his late-night show that her break was “quiet” and she became “part of the world again without fanfare.”
And on a recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Lawrence said she was “at peace” with possibly not returning to acting after taking a break.