Jennifer Lawrence takes risque step in the film ‘Red Sparrow’
As she slipped into a corner booth in a restaurant at a Beverly Hills hotel on a recent afternoon, Jennifer Lawrence was buzzing.
An obsessive fan of reality TV, she had just spotted someone across the room who had appeared on a certain reality series she watches, and she needed a moment to settle down and focus. “Sorry, I’m still excited about my celebrity sighting,” she said. “I’m all jacked up.”
It goes without saying, of course, that Lawrence is not just a celebrity herself but one of the biggest ones currently inhabiting the planet. To date, her movies, including blockbusters in the “Hunger Games” and “X-Men” franchises and smaller films like “Winter’s Bone” and “American Hustle,” have collectively grossed more than $5.6 billion worldwide. At age 27 — two years younger than Meryl Streep was when she received her first-ever Academy Award nomination — she has already scored four Oscar nods, winning the lead actress prize for 2012’s “Silver Linings Playbook.”
To her legions of admirers, though, an essential part of Lawrence’s appeal is that, for all her success, she still comes across as just the sort of regular person who’d freak out at seeing someone she recognized from a reality TV show.
In her latest movie, the spy thriller “Red Sparrow,” opening today, Lawrence takes on a role unlike any she’s played, one that pushed her well outside of her comfort zone. She stars as Dominika Egorova, a Russian prima ballerina who is coerced by her spymaster uncle into becoming a covert intelligence agent. Trained in a top-secret school in the arts of seduction, Egorova is sent on a mission to pry secrets from an American CIA agent (Joel Edgerton).
Based on the 2013 novel by former CIA operative Jason Matthews, the R-rated “Red Sparrow” is sexually charged and often brutal, punctuated with scenes of assassination, torture and attempted rape. When director Francis Lawrence, who helmed three “Hunger Games” films, first approached her about the project, Lawrence immediately fell in love with the character. But, still shaken by the hacking in 2014 of her private intimate photos, she felt wary about diving into a film that
would require her to act, at times naked or nearly so, in such explicit scenes.
“It was really sexual — if it weren't for that, it would have been an easy yes,” said Lawrence. “But I knew that if there was anybody who could make this material that's really salacious and daring tasteful, it's Francis.” In the end, she says, the experience felt empowering. “It kind of belittled the whole thing in a weird way. It's just a body. It's my body. I love my body.”
“I think Jen is fearless,” said “Red Sparrow” producer Jenno Topping, president of film and television at Chernin Entertainment. “She's just so committed to being an actor first as opposed to being a star first.”
When he began adapting “Red Sparrow” for the screen three years ago, Francis Lawrence was concerned that a Cold War thriller about a spy who uses sex as a weapon might not feel relevant. In a twist he couldn't have foreseen, the film is now set to hit theaters as stories of Russian espionage are the stuff of screaming headlines and as controversies over sexual misconduct continue to reverberate across Hollywood and beyond. Against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, the filmmaker admits he's not sure how audiences will receive the movie's depictions of sexual violence, including a scene in which a wealthy, powerful man tries to rape Lawrence's character. “These are themes that have unfortunately been happening in our world for hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” he said. “It's a coincidence that this movie now happens to coincide with the events that are in the news. It's really tricky for me to say how audiences are going to react.”
Moved by her experiences with sexual harassment and objectification and stories shared by other women, Lawrence is involved in Hollywood's Time's Up campaign. “We're reshaping the way we want to be treated,” she said. “There was a norm that existed before that I had been a part of as well. I had, like, guys' hands on my legs and I didn't want to move them because I didn't want to seem crazy or whatever. There was stuff that happened to me when I was younger that now is not going to be normal.”
Highlighting some of the trickier dynamics of the conversation over women and power in Hollywood, days later, controversy erupted over photos of Lawrence taken during the “Red Sparrow” press tour. She was wearing a revealing dress outside on a chilly London day, surrounded by male costars fully covered. Social media lit up with criticisms that the images represent how women are treated in Hollywood.
Lawrence responded in a Facebook post, calling the kerfuffle “utterly ridiculous”: “Overreacting about everything someone says or does, creating controversy over silly innocuous things such as what I choose to wear or not wear, is not moving us forward,” she said. “It's creating silly distractions from real issues. Everything you see me wear is my choice. And if I want to be cold THATS MY CHOICE TOO!”
As for what gets depicted in a film like “Red Sparrow,” however, Lawrence argues that is an entirely separate matter. “At the end of the day, we're the movie industry — we're going to have sex, we're going to have violence,” she said. “If you focus so hard on making something that's politically correct, the art will suffer. Art is subjective. Some people are going to hate it, some people are going to love it.”
That lesson has been brought home to Lawrence over the last couple of years. Her most recent film, Darren Aronofsky's allegorical horror film “mother!” sharply divided critics and received a rare F CinemaScore from audiences. The film before that, 2016's sci-fi romance “Passengers,” costarring Chris Pratt, looked like a project that couldn't miss — “and then it did,” Lawrence said, grossing a less-than-spectacular $100 million domestically and earning generally poor reviews.
As she's gotten older, Lawrence has become increasingly aware that the line between success and failure in Hollywood can be thin.
“It's a very fickle industry,” she said. “I probably felt bulletproof when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,' but I was also young so I didn't care. I was used to doing movies and then they go well — that was my reality. Then it's scary because it's just like any job. If you're demanding a salary and you're saying, ‘I am worth this,' you have to prove you're worth that or your worth goes down.”
She paused. “This is not an industry for the weak of heart.”