Lawrence comes FULL CIRCLE
After rocketing to fame, Oscar winner free of franchise commitments, getting kind of life she imagined
When Jennifer Lawrence started dating her now-husband, art dealer Cooke Maroney, she was just a few months into her still-ongoing project of trying to move through the world like a normal human being again.
At the height of her fame fronting the “Hunger Games” franchise, any night out in public would have required security guards, but Maroney often asked to meet Lawrence at dive bars, and she wasn’t about to spoil those places by showing up with two hulking bodyguards.
What she found, to her pleasant surprise, is that the world allowed her to reenter it without being too weird. Nights spent on the other side of the velvet rope are something Lawrence knows she needs plenty more of in order to continue being any good as a performer.
“I don’t know how I can act,” she said, “when I feel cut off from normal human interaction.”
Without that realization, it’s difficult to imagine Lawrence making a movie like “Causeway,” out now on Apple TV+, an intimate, understated drama in which she plays an injured military engineer who returns home to New Orleans for an uneasy convalescence. “Causeway” is the kind of human-sized indie the actor, 32, hasn’t really starred in since her 2010 breakthrough, “Winter’s Bone,” and it’s an effective reminder that when all the bells and whistles of big-budget Hollywood are stripped away, few people can forge as powerful a connection with the camera as Lawrence, who is readable even in repose.
“The line between her inner life and the lens is held so taut,” said “Causeway” director Lila Neugebauer.
In an October interview, Lawrence said that some of her representatives had steered her away from smaller material like “Causeway,” warning that her audience wouldn’t understand. “I found out that a lot of filmmakers that I really loved and admired had scripts that weren’t even reaching me,” she said.
Eventually, Lawrence realized that too many people were involved in making the decisions that should have been hers alone, and in August 2018, as she wrapped reshoots for the “X-Men” film “Dark Phoenix,” she left CAA, the agency that represented her for 10 years.
“I had let myself be hijacked,” she said.
Lawrence has always had a gift for candor: On screen, she’ll show you things — and off screen, tell you things — that other actors, fortified by fame, tend to keep at a remove. Maybe she never had time to develop a protective shell. When “Winter’s Bone” was released, Lawrence was only 19; a year later, she was cast as Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games,” and only two years after that, she won an Oscar for “Silver Linings Playbook.”
In an era when new movie stars have proven hard to come by, it’s no wonder that Hollywood grabbed onto Lawrence like a life preserver. Still, she could only remain buoyant for so long. In her mid-20s, as she finished up the
“Hunger Games” franchise and moved on to films that were less warmly received, she could sense her fans’ dismay: “I was like, ‘Oh no, you guys are here because I’m here, and I’m here because you’re here. Wait, who decided that this was a good movie?’ ”
Was there a certain title that made her feel that way? “‘Passengers,’ I guess,” Lawrence said, singling out the lambasted 2016 sci-fi romance she starred in with Chris Pratt. “Adele told me not to do it! She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her.”
Somewhere along the way, Lawrence’s career had become too manufactured, said Justine Ciarrocchi, a longtime friend who has since become Lawrence’s producing partner.
She followed “Passengers” with Darren Aronofsky’s ultra-harrowing “Mother!,” then made the sexy spy thriller “Red Sparrow” to prove she’d graduated from her young-adult roots. And though they produced diminishing returns, she kept starring in “X-Men” movies because hey, when you’re a movie star, aren’t you supposed to be making superhero sequels? Seemed like part of the deal.
But none of it was really clicking, and Lawrence could feel a backlash
brewing: She had gotten way too big.
“I felt like more of a celebrity than an actor,” she said, “cut off from my creativity, my imagination.”
Lawrence considers the set to be a safe haven: “If you have a place to be every day, you probably won’t know that you’re suffering from anxiety and depression until it’s over.” Maybe that’s why she was so drawn to Lynsey, her character in “Causeway,” who returns from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury but still yearns to redeploy.
“I obviously cannot relate to risking my life for my country,” Lawrence said, “but I can understand, reading ‘Causeway,’ why I’m getting so emotional about somebody who doesn’t feel like they belong anywhere unless they’re on a schedule.”
Lawrence was moved to make the film her first producing effort, but in summer 2019, when she found herself on that New Orleans set playing Lynsey, she was surprised by just how exposed she felt. There was no accent to adopt, no fake nose to wear, not even studio highlights in her hair. It was just Lawrence standing in front of a patient camera, working through things that felt mined from her life, and it reminded her of “Winter’s Bone,” when it was hard to differentiate between what was real and what wasn’t.
Lawrence has spent this fall shooting the comedy “No Hard Feelings,” which romantically pairs her with the young actor Andrew Barth Feldman. It will be the second produced film from Lawrence and Ciarrocchi — but plenty more are planned. She’s particularly excited about “Die, My Love,” an adaptation of the Ariana Harwicz novel that will be directed by Lynne Ramsay, and a biopic of the powerhouse Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, both of which she’ll star in.
She explained that the name of her production company, Excellent Cadaver, is from an old Sicilian phrase for a hit on a major celebrity. But does Lawrence feel like the target on her back has grown smaller over the last few years?
Yes, she said, now that she’s several years removed from “The Hunger Games”: “I’m not scared of 13-year-olds anymore. They have no idea who I am.”
“I can tell things are different by my interactions in the real world, just by the way that I can move about life,” she said. “There’s an occasional article about me walking out in
Ugg boots, but other than that, the interest has lessened, God bless it.”
So who is Jennifer Lawrence, now that she’s done with all of her franchise commitments and can move around relatively unfettered? She said that before she had signed on to “The Hunger Games” and had to radically reenvision her future, she pictured a life in which she’d work a lot and have a family but fly just enough under the radar to live normally.
“And now, full circle, I’m kind of getting the life that I imagined,” she said.