Six years. That’s how long it took actor Jennifer Lawrence to travel the distance between complete obscurity to top-notch Hollywood stardom. The 26-year-old, who got her first Oscar Best Actress nomination at the age of 20, has achieved much more than even the most famous women of Hollywood had at her age. She seems to have it all—an Oscar, great roles written for her and an extraordinary lineup of films with directors like Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky and Adam McKay.
At first glance, she might look like just another blonde girl. But, right from her first acting gig, which was at age 9 in a church play in her hometown Kentucky, Lawrence stayed away from the usual blonde girl stereotypes. Because, her first outing was as a prostitute! This pretty much explains the choices that Lawrence made after an agent “discovered” her and brought her to Los Angeles at 14. She skipped the whole teen-movie-to-rom-com progression and jumped right away to meatier roles in drama films like The Poker House and The Burning Plain, in which she played deeply troubled teens. It was her role as a poverty-stricken teenager who is forced to save her siblings in the indie drama Winter’s Bone that landed her the Oscar nod and some much-awaited mainstream attention.
Lawrence then appeared in her role as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise and is also a part of another hugely successful franchise X-Men, in which she plays the shapeshifting mutant Mystique. The actor, who is the youngest person to be nominated for the most number of Oscars ever, won her first Academy Award playing a depressed widow in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook just four years ago. And, what’s more, with her latest film Passengers, which is all set to hit Indian screens today, Lawrence became the highest paid actress in the world having negotiated for a paycheck of $20 million, a whole $8 million more than her co-star, Chris Pratt.
Playing Aurora Lane, an ambitious journalist, in director Morten Tyldum’s sci-fi drama, Lawrence says, in an exclusive email interview to THE WEEK, that the “intriguing and huge decision” her character makes to leave planet Earth to make a 120-year journey to start a life on a brand new planet was what attracted her to the film. “Why would anyone want to take such a journey that when you arrive back, everyone you know is going to be dead? That’s what interested me,” she says. The film tells the story of two passengers aboard a spaceship on this journey who wake up 90 years too early due to a malfunction in the ship. How they work together to save the rest of the passengers onboard from the imminent collapse of the ship is what constitutes the rest of the film.
The makers and her co-star Chris Pratt agree that when she came on board the project, the scale took a massive shift. It became a “Jennifer Lawrence film”, which in this day and age means a lot in terms of its economics. For Lawrence, this film was not in her plan. “I wanted to do a few more years of independent films,” she says. “I had done a few big films and I thought it was time to go back to where I started.” But the script, written by Prometheus fame Jon Spaihts, convinced her otherwise.
Aurora, says Lawrence, is a very complex character. “It was hard for me to reason out with her at first,” she says. “Then I slowly started getting where she was coming from. She is very smart, driven and curious.” Her purpose is at once both ambitious, yet selfless. “That is an interesting mix. She wants to be the first person who takes this journey and writes about it. And, she also has this whole other aspect of her wanting to break away from the shadow of her famous author father, come into her own and have her own name.”
Much like her character, Lawrence, too, is fiercely ambitious in real life. But despite her quick rise to stardom, she has remained quite grounded and down-to-earth, says her friends and co-workers. Pratt says that with Lawrence what you see is what you get. “She is a real fighter and I love her for that,” he says. “As a co-star and person, she is refreshingly direct. It was so easy for me to work with her because if she is happy or if she is angry, she just lets you know. There’s no pretense or artificiality.” Defying the common notion that actresses can never be friends, Lawrence also shares good relations with her contemporaries like Emma Stone and Amy Schumer, both of whom have opened up in recent interviews about her “quirky” and “twisted” sense of humour.
Workwise, her plate is full as of now. Lawrence has bagged a slew of interesting projects, one of them with the master filmmaker Spielberg, in which she plays war photographer Lynsey Addario. The film, titled It’s What I Do, is also produced by Lawrence. Apart from that she gets back with her Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence in Red Sparrow, in which she plays a Russian ballerina-turned-spy. She also plays Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the controversial Silicon Valley company Theranos in Bad Blood, directed by McKay and appears in Aronofsky’s horror film, Mother, alongside Javier Bardem and Michelle Pfeiffer.
In a way, says Lawrence, she understands why Aurora takes the decision to leave Earth and everyone she knows and loves behind. “Whenever I go to film a movie, I kind of leave everything behind—family, friends, everything—and give my full energy to it,” she says. But would she ever want to leave for a new life on another planet? “No. I can’t imagine saying goodbye to my family and friends forever. I don’t think I would be able to do that. But then again, it would depend on how bad things on Earth are!” she says, in her characteristic wit.
