red sparrow
Jennifer Lawrence’s new multi-layered, unflinching spy thriller made physical and emotional demands on its star that scared her. But Red Sparrow’s timely mix of sex and politics makes it a story of female empowerment both on and off-screen. Lawrence and h
Jennifer Lawrence reveals all about her toughest role yet as a Russian spy.
Jennifer Lawrence is having “a fuck of a day”. It’s just before the Oscar nomination announcements and she’s running between gown fittings all over LA while also trying to compose a speech she needs to give. Like her latest character – an inscrutable Russian honey-trap spy – she’s, understandably, a difficult woman to pin down. It’s something that frustrates Lawrence and makes her hugely apologetic when we finally align schedules and hook up to chat, prompting her immediate, conciliatory f-bomb explanation.
If that language is too salty for you, Lawrence probably gives zero figs. Now 27 years old and at the top of her game – she’s in the top three of Hollywood’s highest paid actresses (her bestie, Emma Stone, crowns the list), an Oscar winner, the face of two monster franchises in X-Men and The Hunger Games and a leading member of the Time’s Up movement – she’s feeling emancipated in all sorts of ways. No longer an inexperienced newcomer, and burnt by fame and intrusion (more of which later), she’s choosing unexpected and challenging work, such as the recent Marmite Mother!, and determined to take control of her own public image. Red Sparrow is a cinematic expression of that. A strong, complex female role in a relevant narrative of sexual abuse and patriarchal politics, where the resourceful woman at the centre of it ultimately calls the shots. And yes, we’re talking gunshots as well as lensed ones…
How so? Rewind to post-production on the penultimate instalment of
The Hunger Games, Mockingjay – Part 1. It’s 2014 and director Francis Lawrence is standing in the lobby of The Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego during Comic-Con, pitching his take on a new project to Fox’s studio president. Having been sent ex-CIA operative Jason Matthews’ page-turner, Red Sparrow, by the studio, he’s already got a handle on how to adapt a novel tracing the fall and rise of Russian prima ballerina Dominika Egorova, who is manipulated into attending sex spy school and becomes embroiled in lethal international espionage. It’s a book The Washington Post notes pays particular attention to “the grimy catechism” of training beautiful young people in the art of seduction, that is unvarnished and unblinking in its description of hardcore classes to demystify sex. It’s a polar opposite to the comparative purity of Katniss’ heroic struggle through
The Hunger Games.
“Honestly, I really fell in love with the character and her journey in it,” recalls Lawrence when TF catches the director in LA. “To be able to approach a spy film as a personal film, I thought was really interesting and emotional
– as opposed to a mission-oriented film, or a technological-and-actionoriented film. I thought of Jen
immediately. And I kind of pitched her [during the Comic-Con meeting with Fox], because I thought: one, she’s a phenomenal actress and I really enjoy working with her; two, I thought she could look Russian; and three, I just thought it would be really exciting, having spent five years doing the same character with her, to do something completely different – a different look, a different way of moving, a different way of speaking, a completely different tone, different emotional values to get into.” He pauses and laughs. “But of course, I hadn’t pitched it to Jennifer yet. She wasn’t necessarily on board. But luckily, she [eventually] was. I pitched her the idea before we had the script and she was interested. We just kept talking about it as we developed it.”
Through that process Lawrence admits he was nervous that his leading lady wouldn’t want to go to some of the darker and more explicit places required of the story. Particularly as a key part of his pitch and his mission was to ensure this film was a tonal ‘hard R’. “Part of what makes the story and the book unique is the tone and the visceral qualities of it all. And it’s also a really integral aspect to her character. The violence is important. What happens to her is important. The violence that’s within her is important. Movies need dynamics, and this was not going to be an action film. So the dynamics were going to have to come from something else – partly from the emotional dilemma of the story with her, but also from the violence and from some of the
‘what happens to her is important. the violence that’s within her is important’ Francis Lawrence
sexuality in the movie as well. I got nervous that she wasn’t going to want to do it because, from previous conversations years earlier, I felt she didn’t have an interest in doing anything with real sexuality or nudity in it.”
But the duo kept talking. J. Lawrence read the book while F. Lawrence developed the script… and then something life-changing happened to Jennifer. In September 2014, she became one of 100 high-profile women whose personal photos were hacked and leaked online. The experience of having intimate, naked pictures of herself shared around the world was one she’s described as “unbelievably violating”, likening it to being “gang-banged by the fucking planet”. It changed the way she looked at Red Sparrow and its harrowing depictions of sexual violence and nudity requirements. And Lawrence shared her director’s sentiment that there was no PG-13-ing this stuff.
“Because there’s really no other way,” she asserts. “If you’re going to tell the story, then you have to tell it correctly. So that was something that I really had to think about for a long time before saying yes. Because I was only going to say yes if I was really willing to take myself to those places. Once I accepted… you know, ‘OK, nudity’
– I kind of got over it. Because it’s a fascinating story about a woman who’s physically victimised, and she’s forced to use her body, but she ends up prevailing by using her mind. So I had to be willing to use my body.”
The scenes in question see former prima ballerina Dominika – career destroyed by injury, her mother in desperate need of medical care and her life on a knife-edge having witnessed multiple high-ranking murders – agree to attend Sparrow school to “learn to push yourself beyond all limitation” under the gimlet eye of Matron (Charlotte Rampling). To test the pupils’ resolve and clinical approach to sensuality, they are ordered matterof-factly to perform sex acts in front of the class. Lawrence knew that the scenes were key for characterisation and to illustrate the venal power of sex – and in light of her personal exposure,
‘she’s forced to use her body, but she ends up prevailing by using her mind’ JennifeR LawRence
she pivoted to using her own on-screen nudity as part of her healing process.
“It really was,” she says. “Because it was never my choice for the world to see my naked body. I didn’t get to make that decision. In doing this film, in doing this for my art… I really felt, I still feel, empowered. I feel like I took something back that was taken from me.”
Having said that, Lawrence is unequivocal about the role of a woman in owning and asserting that power herself. “Nudity by choice is a completely different thing from being violated. This was my choice, and it was for my craft. It’s important to remember that there is a difference.” And besides, she’s a woman who runs towards fear and not away from it. “I always get a little bit of excitement every time something scares me, and then I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t think I can do this.’ I’m always going to be drawn to those when it’s with a director I trust so implicitly.”
From Russia with Love
With the two Lawrences working closely on the project (“I knew Francis would be able to take something that’s daring and provocative, but make it tasteful – so he’s the perfect person to collaborate with on it,” Jennifer enthuses), Francis began to cast the other roles in his web of intrigue. Though this is Dominika’s story, her American counterpart, CIA operative Nate Nash, required an actor who could navigate the emotional beats of a twisty-turny, trust-no-one narrative. The director says he immediately thought of Joel Edgerton, but to hear the Aussie tell it, he just got lucky in the revolving door of casting.
“Actually, I don’t know how these things come about. It just happened that it was me instead of some other dude,” he laughs in between sips of morning coffee before he hits the edit suite in Sydney when TF calls him. “Look, I think the real thing is Francis and I really hit it off and I was maybe the right person. There’s a bit of an age gap between my character and Dominika and that’s the way the movie’s built. He’s supposed to be a bit of a loner, a bit of an alcoholic, a bit of a CIA loser – with a heart that’s too big for the job. So maybe there is an aspect of me that is that character, in terms of my age, my roughness, the way I seem to be as a person, my nature.” (We can probably assume that Edgerton isn’t great at writing his CV.)
For Francis Lawrence, Edgerton offered a different type of hero and romantic interest. “One of the reasons
I cast him is that Nate is a very honest guy. One of the complexities of him is that he has some trouble at work and he needs to get back into the game. And so even though he’s this honest guy, there has to be a selfish quality to his needs and objectives. Joel’s perfect for that.” And there was also the element of upping the stakes for Jennifer and making sure that duo sat very much outside of the YA sphere of The Hunger Games. “I love Liam [Hemsworth] and Josh [Hutcherson], but they’re very young men, and I wanted her to be challenged by a really established, older actor; somebody who has age, sophistication, a history. I wanted to move us into a real adult world. If you go much younger, we would have lost that.”
While he went mature on the love/ political interest, Lawrence pushed in the opposite direction for the role of Dominika’s ruthless Uncle Vanya, who manipulates her and proudly sends her off to the indignities and injustices of Sparrow School. “I wanted to skew that role younger,” he says of casting Matthias Schoenaerts. “There’s kind of a creepy chemistry between Dominika and Vanya. And then he’s really handsome. Oddly, casting him created this weird triangle with her, him and Joel’s character.” It also doesn’t hurt that with a severe side parting and button-down style, Schoenaerts, aptly, looks like he could be a Putin family member. “He does!” yelps Lawrence, “That was accidental. On our first day of shooting with him, which I think was the scene in the café where he gives her her mission – we were all sort of knocked out by how much he actually looks like [Putin]!”
Keeping his supporting roles equally pedigree, the director nabbed Charlotte Rampling as the sadistic Sparrow School matron (“She just seems so smart and intimidating and her eyes are so complex”); Jeremy Irons as government toad Korchnoi (“There’s reasons that I cast him that might get into spoilery territory, but there’s a complexity he can bring that makes it interesting”) and Mary-Louise Parker as an unscrupulous US attache (“Full force!”). With cast
‘when i finished, i just walked out feeling empowered. i felt amazing’ Jennifer Lawrence
locked, Lawrence wanted to world-build as he had done with Panem, but this time real-world. With action flitting from Moscow to Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna and London, he eschewed greenscreen and sound stages in favour of location shooting and soaking up the Iron Curtain feel.
“The scope, the aesthetic and the textures all come from the real places that we shot,” he enthuses. “And it’s been a real joy to not be walking on soundstages, but to be out and snooping around real neighbourhoods, real buildings and shooting in them. Sparrow School was at this place called Festetics Palace in Dég, near Budapest. We were in this social club house for this old factory, also near Budapest, for the scene where Charlotte brings Jen and another cadet out front and tells them to undress. That was actually this socialist recreation room where they would gather workers and their families for community events.”
Oh, that scene. The one that Lawrence admits she was scared of performing from the get go. “Sparrow School was definitely daunting,” she admits, “because what you see, you know,
I really did. My character is told to strip in front of the class, and I had to strip in front of a class and an entire crew. I worked myself up [about the scene], I was really nervous. But Francis made me feel so much more comfortable. Everybody made me feel like I had clothes on. And then when I finished, I just walked out feeling empowered. I felt amazing.”
That liberation extended to Lawrence’s downtime while location shooting, despite a record-breaking winter. “I loved Budapest. It was four months of just this bubble. There weren’t any paparazzi. Nobody expects to see me in Budapest. So I really had this four months of freedom that I haven’t had in years.” The bubble was broken unceremoniously in Vienna when Lawrence was unknowingly filmed attempting pole dancing with friends at the Beverly Hills Strip Club where the crew had filmed earlier. She was gloriously unrepentant on her Facebook page when the grainy footage leaked, “Look, nobody wants to be reminded that they tried to dance on a stripper pole by the internet,” she wrote.
“It was one of my best friend’s birthdays and I dropped my paranoia guard for one second to have fun. I’m not going to apologise, I had a BLAST that night… I’m not gonna lie, I think my dancing’s pretty good. Even with no core strength.”
RAISING THE BARRE
Lawrence is clearly under-selling her core strength, mind. To get fighting fit to play a Russian prima ballerina she threw herself into ballet training with Kurt Froman (who trained Portman and Kunis for Black Swan) for three hours a day over three months and drilled in the Russian accent with dialect coach Tim Monich. “She was willing to do all the training,” nods Francis Lawrence. “For big dance shots, she had a double [from the American Ballet Theatre]. We’re not going to be hiding that – it’d be really arrogant to try and say that someone with no dance training can dance like a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi. But she still had to train and she still had to get out there in the costume in front of 500 extras on stage, and make her way through this routine. It took a lot of guts.”
J. Lawrence admits that her dedication to her Russian cadence was less intense, in part because her crew were familiar faces from The Hunger Games. “I tried to stay in the accent, but it’s so hard, because I’ve known the crew for so long, so I can’t talk to them in a Russian accent,” she groans. “Next time I do a movie doing an accent, I’m never going to go in and out [of accents], because it makes it so much harder”.
But that, Francis Lawrence suggests, is part of the charm of working with Jennifer. Having grafted with her through her formative years, he still sees the same girl he first met at the age of 20. “Her life has completely changed, she’s a different person in that sense – but as an actress, she still has the same approach. She doesn’t read the script a lot, she’s not practising, her performance is all intuitive. It’s always amazing to me, no matter how intense a scene is, she doesn’t carry it beyond. On the Mockingjay movies, we actually cut a reel together of the moment she switches – because she will be joking
and cracking fart jokes right up to the moment you call ‘action’. And you just see, in a millisecond, she changes and becomes the character. As soon as you cut, it’s straight back to Jen. I keep waiting, as she gets older, for things to linger and for it to get harder to get to darker or scarier places. But she can just snap right in and out. It’s incredible.”
For Jennifer Lawrence, this is another part of her coping strategy. “Joel and I are very similar. We’d both be joking and talking about something completely different until ‘action’. I always enjoy it, because I need that just for my sanity, to go in and out. I can’t imagine staying in a headspace and not having fun. We’re working over 12 hours a day. We want to be having fun. Otherwise why would you do it?” Edgerton agrees, “You know, there has to be a level of humour when there’s a sexual element to shooting a film. Because when people are nervous and when people are anxious, the best way to combat that is with humour. You’d be sitting there in your underpants, in a robe, about to pretend you’re having sex with someone. You’ve got to have a bit of a laugh to get through it.”
Though all three are keen to reprise the Red Sparrow experience with sequels – and with Matthews’ heroine featuring in a trilogy of books there’s every chance they could – they are adamant that this damaged killer ballerina story isn’t merely filling a Marvel’s Black Widowshaped hole in the cinema landscape. Jennifer maintains she is unfamiliar with Natasha Romanoff’s origin story while Edgerton argues that “Marvel has its own patina, rhythm, style and nature of movie, which is about cities being destroyed and the physical battles – that’s a different type of movie”. But they can all agree that the fact that a female-led action movie like this – and following on the kickass heels of last year’s Atomic Blonde and Wonder Woman – can only be a good thing in the current sea-change around women’s rights and gender equality.
“There were all these myths before things like Wonder Woman or even The Hunger Games – why women shouldn’t be leading action movies, or shouldn’t be getting paid as much for action movies,” pooh-poohs J-Law. “‘Women can relate to a male hero, but men can’t relate to a female heroine…’ and these movies continue to come out and continue to prove that wrong.”
“It’s now my fourth movie with a female protagonist. I can’t say that I’m doing it on purpose, but I’m drawn to the stories,” says Edgerton. “But it’s definitely something that needs to just be out there. We need to be telling women’s stories. Young boys get to go to nine out of 10 movies and watch the fantasy version of themselves conquer the world, girls get to do it less so. So it’s cool that Red Sparrow is out there. And it’s pertinent to what’s going on in Hollywood. It’s not just about guys, and we can’t keep telling those stories.”
Lawrence and Lawrence certainly have no plans to stop telling those stories – next up they plan to collaborate on Dive, a biopic of freediving couple Pipin Ferraras and Audrey Mestre (previously attached to James Cameron). “Francis is so talented, creative, brilliant, and he’s nice,” says Lawrence. “He’s organised. Sometimes you can work with people who are brilliant, but shooting is kind of a disaster because they’re not as good at schedules. But he’s everything that I want from a director, so I hope that I get to work with him many, many more times.”
If Red Sparrow lights up the box office, she may well get her wish…
Red Sparrow opens 1 March.
‘WHEN PEOPLE ARE NERVOUS AND ANXIOUS, THE BEST WAY TO COMBAT THAT IS WITH HUMOUR’ JOEL EDGERTON