Jennifer Lawrence: “I Didn’t Have a Life. I Thought I Should Go Get One”

At first glance, it appears that Jennifer Lawrence has either been institutionalized or is on the set of a horror movie. She’s sitting in a rattan rocking chair, slowly creaking back and forth. The walls of the otherwise empty room are colorless and bare, except for the discomfiting shadow of a ladder over her right shoulder. Her hair is long and wet. Her computer sits atop a stack of boxes, angled for this September morning’s stint in Zoom prison so that her pregnant belly is out of sight. There’s a scratching at the door behind her. No fool, her cat Frank, otherwise known as Fredericks, doesn’t want any part of this and is trying to get out.

Told to blink twice if she needs rescuing, Lawrence laughs. She and her husband of two years, art gallery director Cooke Maroney, are in a rental while their Manhattan town house is under construction. The austerity of the room feels staged to discourage any unwanted probing. So urgent is Lawrence’s desire for privacy that she recently gave up her beloved dog, Pippi. The paparazzi had come to count on their daily walks in Central Park, so now the dog can chase squirrels unbothered on her parents’ farm in Kentucky, and Lawrence fantasizes about a life with 15 cats.

“I’m so nervous,” she says at the start of our conversation. “I haven’t spoken to the world in forever. And to come back now, when I have all of these new accessories added to my life that I obviously want to protect….” She crosses her arms over her baggy gray sweater. “I’m nervous for you. I’m nervous for me. I’m nervous for the readers!”

After a long break from public life, Lawrence returns to the screen in Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy Don’t Look Up, in which she and Leonardo DiCaprio play scientists screaming at a polarized society to take seriously the comet hurtling toward the planet. It’s her first comedy, and the timing of stepping back into the spotlight while pregnant with her first child is almost comedic.

By early 2018, Lawrence was one of the highest paid actors in the world—an Oscar winner who stumbled up the steps on the way to collect the trophy, further cementing her public image as the movie star you’d most like to chug a beer with—but she’d had enough. Her last four movies (Passengers, Mother!, Red Sparrow, and the 12th X-Men film, Dark Phoenix) turned out to be critical or box office disappointments. “I was not pumping out the quality that I should have,” she says, a sad statement for someone so fiercely talented. “I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right. If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’… I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.”

Lawrence’s producing partner and best friend of 13 years, Justine Polsky, says: “The protocol of stardom began to kill her creative spirit, to fuck with her compass. So, she vanished, which was probably the most responsible way to protect her gifts. And sanity.”