‘I want my new film to traumatise you’
Jennifer Lawrence talks to John Hiscock about her dark new film ‘Mother!’, which was both cheered and jeered at Venice
Ever since Jennifer Lawrence played a prostitute in a church play when she was nine years old, the Oscarwinning actress has enjoyed challenging both herself and the audience. But nothing on her CV compares to her latest role in Darren Aronofsky’s baffling and berserk psychological drama Mother!
It was greeted with both jeers and cheers when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week and has divided reviewers. “We didn’t make this film to be a darling,” says Lawrence when we meet in Toronto, before the film’s premiere at the city’s film festival. “It’s loud, it’s aggressive and it’s an assault. Darren had this story burning inside him and he had to get it out.”
The film centres on a married couple (Lawrence and Javier Bardem) whose lives start unravelling when unexpected guests, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, arrive at their remote, rural home. Over the next two hours, things get progressively more weird. Lawrence’s character, barefoot and known only as mother, flushes a beating heart down the lavatory; blood in the shape of a vagina melts through the floorboards; and the movie descends to ever greater depths of depraved intensity when a series of increasingly crazy visitors show up like an army of the walking dead.
Aronofsky, with whom Lawrence got together during filming, wrote it in five days and Lawrence is clear on what it’s about: “It depicts the rape and torment of Mother Earth,” she says, before conceding: “It’s not for everybody. It’s a hard film to watch. But it’s important for people to understand the allegory we intended. That they know I represent Mother Earth, Javier, whose character is a poet, represents a form of God, a creator; Michelle Pfeiffer is an Eve to Ed Harris’s Adam, there’s Cain and Abel and the setting sometimes resembles the Garden of Eden. For Darren to take these massive biblical themes and condense them into a narrative about a house and a couple I think is just brilliant. I have never heard of anything like it.”
The shoot was gruelling. During filming the 27-yearold actress suffered sleepless nights, bouts of crying and towards the end she hyperventilated and tore her diaphragm.
“Playing this character was totally outside my comfort zone,” she says. “Darren said it so well – that this is the first time I have been put on my back foot. And being this vulnerable was something that scared me throughout the filming. It was the most out-of-whack I have ever been.”
Her family has yet to see Mother!. “I am a little worried about my brothers and Darren after they see it,” she laughs. “We’re going to have to create a little bit of separation between them.” What about her millions of young fans who loved her in the Hunger Games movies? Aren’t they likely to be traumatised by what she goes through too?
“If they are traumatised by it, good, that is how we get people to stop the environmental abuse and start caring,” she says. “The film makes a statement about what we are doing to Earth. I hope it traumatises them into action.”
Lawrence is wearing a simple, long black dress and her blonde hair hangs on her shoulders. She is cheerful and upbeat, occasionally laughing and joking but turning serious while talking about the environment and climate change.
“I am very political,” she says. “It’s a huge passion for me. It’s hard not to be in these times. It’s all about responsibility, and our only voice is voting. So I think it’s incredibly important to stay educated and keep your eyes open and not bury your head in the sand. It scares me for the future. And it scares me that the people in charge don’t believe that climate change exists.”
She recently fell foul of the American Right when John Carney, a journalist on the conservative website Breitbart, criticised a recent Vogue cover featuring Lawrence posing in front of the Statue of Liberty as an attack on the Trump administration’s attitude towards immigration. Lawrence laughs it off. “I have been having such a fun week reading the stories,” she says.
She is, perhaps unsurprisingly, less forthcoming on her romantic life. She spent five years with the British actor Nicholas Hoult and then dated Chris Martin, the frontman of band Coldplay, before linking up with Aronofsky, who has an 11-year-old son with his former partner, Rachel Weisz.
“I would like to have kids one day, I see myself as a mother, but I don’t really know the layout of my future,” is all she will say on this. “I definitely have maternal stirrings. But everything might change.”
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Lawrence performed in local theatre productions before being scouted in New York at the age of 14.
“I knew acting was what I was supposed to be doing and I thought I could be good at it,” she says. “Then I was flown out to Los Angeles and it all just kind of started.”
Unlike many young actresses who begin their careers in romantic comedies, Lawrence was cast in more harrowing independents, playing a teen raped by her mother’s pimp in The Poker House, delivering an eyecatching performance as a troubled
teenage daughter in Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain and, in her breakthrough role, a teenager trying to track down her methdealing dad amid the impoverished backwaters of the Ozarks in Winter’s Bone.
Then came The Hunger Games and the role of the rebel warrior Katniss Everdeen, which vaulted her into the big league of Hollywood earners and won her a massive fan following of teenage girls.
“The day The Hunger Games came out was a bizarre one for me because I wasn’t famous 24 hours earlier and I got up to go about my day as usual and went to the grocery store,” she recalls.
“All of a sudden there were 25 paparazzi following me and there was a three-car pile-up. I was terrified. I went home and locked myself in the house. I couldn’t really process anything.
“Then my doorbell rang and my friends were there with wine and vodka and the things I needed. They came in and we all watched TV and had a normal day, so that was nice.”
There was a point in her life when she was unwilling to leave the house for fear of being recognised. Nowadays Lawrence, who won an Oscar for her performance in the 2013 film Silver Linings Playbook and is one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, is much more at ease.
“I just think that everybody deserves personal space. I’m at a different place than I was a couple of years ago,” she says. “I’m not worried about being nice and polite to everybody all the time. If I’m by myself and don’t have security and I feel my public space is being violated then I defend myself. Since I realised that I don’t have to be everybody’s best friend and I don’t have to take selfies with people in public bathrooms, then going out became a lot easier because I didn’t have so much anxiety.
“I have a very small circle of friends and the moment I feel like someone is using me or knows me for the wrong reasons, I have no guilt about just cutting them out of my life,” she adds. “My b------- detector is phenomenal. Everything in my life has to be real.”
‘The day The Hunger Games came out was a bizarre one for me because I wasn’t famous 24 hours earlier’