Jennifer Lawrence is sharing her regrets about doing some of her bigger-budget movies like Passengers and the impact her then-agency CAA had on those decisions following her Hunger Games success.
In a new interview with The New York Times promoting her latest film, Causeway, the Oscar-winning actress discussed her relationship to fame, acting in Hollywood and why she chose the kind of roles she took on — and that were presented to her — in her 20s.
Citing Causeway as a departure from her past choices and part of a new era of performance for her after a brief hiatus to start her family, Lawrence said she had started to feel more like a “celebrity than an actor” and was “cut off from my creativity, my imagination.”
“Everything was like a rebound effect,” she said of her project choices after Hunger Games, which included sci-fi and action movies like Passengers, Red Sparrow and roles in the X-Men franchise. “I was reacting, rather than just acting.”
Lawrence shared that part of that was influenced by her then-talent agency, CAA, which she amicably parted ways with in 2018. The actress said she was being steered away from “smaller material like Causeway,” Times reporter Kyle Buchanan writes, and it was at that point she “realized that too many people were involved in making the decisions that should have been hers alone.”
“I found out that a lot of filmmakers that I really loved and admired had scripts that weren’t even reaching me,” Lawrence told the Times. “I had let myself be hijacked.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to CAA for comment.
Part of what she had been “hijacked” into doing was sci-fi romance Passengers, where she starred opposite Chris Pratt, a film she said her friend, music superstar Adele, told her not to do.
On fans’ disappointment with the film, she said, “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?’ 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.”
While Lawrence has regrets about some of those big-budget movies, she doesn’t regret doing The Hunger Games and looks back positively on her time with the franchise, calling those movies “fantastic.” Still, the pressure and fame around them were sources of stress — the actress at one point compared her experience doing press to Britney Spears in the “Lucky” music video. As a result, she ended up bonding more with her co-stars Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth.
“The only thing that gave me pause was just how famous it would make me,” she says of the Hunger Games films before revealing how she blew off steam after big press events. “The boys and I would always go back to our hotel and just drink whiskey and get stoned.”
“My mother-in-law’s going to love this,” she quickly adds. “I don’t do it anymore, I’m a mom!“
As for how Lawrence feels about the upcoming Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, she’s got no specific opinion on it other than to note it came quite quickly after her stint with the franchise.
“That makes me feel old as mold,” Lawrence says. “I remember being 21 and thinking, ‘My God, one day they’ll redo and remake them. But I’ll be so old by then! I’ll be dead!’”
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