FREE AS A BIRD

As she stars as a Soviet spy, Jennifer Lawrence on her passion for trashy TV and a glass of red, and the old pals who protect her from the pitfalls of fame

Jennifer Lawrence on the joys of single life, trashy TV and how she’s shaken off her fears about fame

You might think that the biggest challenge for Jennifer Lawrence in making her new film Red Sparrow, in which she plays a Soviet dancer turned seductive spy, would be the risque love scenes.

But in fact it was the ballet. Yes, despite all her previous experience portraying gracefully lethal girls in the Hunger Games and X-Men movies, Jennifer found that dancing was her downfall.

‘It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done,’ she says. ‘The Hunger Games was running and archery, straightforward athleticism, but this is an art form. I trained for four months for three hours a day just to move my arm like a ballerina.’

In the film Jennifer, 27, plays Russian Dominika Egorova, a ballet dancer whose career is finished by an injury. She needs to support her infirm mother so trains to be a ‘sparrow,’ one of an elite group of young spies who use their feminine wiles to entrap and eliminate enemies of the state. Based on a novel written by real-life CIA operative Jason Matthews, and rich with insider detail, the film also stars Charlotte Rampling and Jeremy Irons.

Before she took the role – and presumably before she realised what a challenge the dancing would be – Jennifer’s biggest concern was the amount of flesh she’d have to bare.

‘There’s a lot of dark material in this movie that will make people uncomfortable,’ she says. ‘But for us to tell the story in a correct way was more important than any fears that I had. Of course I was nervous about it, particularly the nudity, but I felt it was necessary to the plot, and I said “yes” because either I was going to go all the way and do those scenes, or somebody else was going to play the part, because there was no other way of telling the story.’

She says the Red Sparrow crew, led by director Francis Lawrence who worked with her on three of the Hunger Games films, were very supportive in her most daring scenes. ‘They made me feel comfortable, and when I walked away I felt empowered by having done it.’

Surprisingly, she says that in many ways the life of an undercover agent like Dominika is not dissimilar to the life of a movie star. ‘It’s about learning to read people. Dominika has to learn tactics, and has been forced into a sort of survival mode. My own reading of people is more directed to the question of people in my life – are they excited to talk to me, or is it because of who I am? So I just tune into a different area of reading people than Dominika does.’

Jennifer, whose father owns a construction company and mother manages a summer camp, has been Jennifer as Russian ballet dancer

turned-spy Dominika Egorova incredibly famous for six years now – ever since the first Hunger Games film in 2012. ‘The movie came out, and the next morning I went to Whole Foods in LA and I realised that there were 15 paparazzi following me. It changed my relationship with sweatpants, I’ll tell you that!’

She admits that in the early days of her fame she found it overpowering. These days, she has a handle on it. ‘I’m not worried about being nice and polite all the time – I take care of myself. I can’t do what I love without fans, and I’m so grateful for everyone that watches my movies. But everybody deserves personal space. And since I’ve come to grips with that – since I’ve realised I don’t have to be everyone’s best friend, and I don’t have to take selfies with people in a public bathroom, for instance – then going out has become a lot easier. I don’t have the anxiety that I used to have.’

Now single, since she split with her boyfriend Darren Aronofsky last October, she has been enjoying the chance to ‘be alone and do whatever I want and watch terrible TV whenever I want to’. It was reportedly wanting to watch such ‘terrible TV’ that was part of the reason for her split from Aronofsky, the controversial director of The Wrestler and Black Swan, who she met on the set of their film Mother!. They were an unlikely couple. Aronofsky, 49, is the Harvard- educated former partner of Rachel Weisz who writes on a desk which is crafted from rare Bastogne walnut wood and contains within it 25 wooden puzzles to tease the brain. Jennifer is 22 years younger, a cheerful high school graduate from Kentucky who finds most Ivy League people tiresome – ‘they can’t go two minutes without mentioning that they went to Harvard’. She adores reality TV and is obsessed by the Kardashians – something she’s said Darren found ‘vastly disappointing’.

If their differences took a toll on the relationship, the public reaction to Mother! dealt a death blow. It was booed at the Venice Film Festival last September and labelled a ‘pretentious mess’ by some. ‘I’d come back to the hotel and the last thing I’d want to talk about is a movie,’ she has said of the publicity tour she and Darren undertook together last autumn. ‘But that’s all he’d want to talk about. I get it, it’s his baby. But I was trying to be the supportive partner while also thinking, “Can I please, for the love of God, not think about Mother! for one second?”’ Nor did it help, she admits, that they argued constantly about how to present the at- times baffling story of a poet (Javier Bardem) and his wife ( Lawrence) whose life in their country home is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious couple. Darren conceived the film as an allegory on religion and what mankind is doing to the planet, and Jennifer felt this needed to be explained. Darren was adamant that it did not. ‘So I’d go out and tell people and he wouldn’t, then we’d come home and that was it!’ she says.

Her single life now, she adds with palpable relief, is far less conflict-ridden. ‘I come home and say hello to my dog Pippi. I take her outside and feed her. Then I turn on the TV and I’ll pour a glass of red wine. Nothing interesting – I just watch TV!’ She’s been talking about taking a year out from acting to work more with Represent . Us which aims to get more young people involved in politics and to fight corruption, but before that she’ll be making the movie Bad Blood, about US entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes. The world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, Holmes invented a new method of blood-testing technology which it was claimed would save millions of lives, but she ended up being investigated for fraud. As for dating, Jennifer is aware fame will be a complicating factor. But she has secret weapons. ‘My girlfriends,’ she says. ‘I have very wise girlfriends who have grown with me all of this time. If there’s something I don’t see, they will. I’ll be leaving a party where I met someone and I’ll say, “He seemed like a nice guy,” and my friend will say, “Uh... he literally pushed me out of the way to get to you.” So there are many eyes on the people who I get close with.’ Prospective suitors, beware.

Red Sparrow is in cinemas now.