Jennifer Lawrence Updates Her Personality™

[ranierean]

Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark
She has been cast in maternal roles since her teens. Now, playing a mother for the first time since becoming one, she has chosen the part of a woman pushed past the edge of sanity.
By Jia Tolentino
October 27, 2025
The New Yorker

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“...So hyper. So embarrassing... Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ I was young, I lived alone, I was being chased,” she said. Paparazzi followed her when she drove around in Los Angeles; at night, adrenaline threw off her sleep. She had too many projects and was doing too much press, and she felt “pissed,” she said. “I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on ‘S.N.L.’ was spot-on.” (“I’m just, like, a snackaholic,” Grande said, in 2016, on a “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch, sporting a tight dress and a perfectly groomed blond wig. “I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”) But the backlash did make her life seem “uninhabitable,” Lawrence said. “I felt—I didn’t feel, I was, I think—rejected not for my movies, not for my politics, but for me, for my personality.”

“I feel like I am driven by anxiety... When I was a kid, I soothed my anxiety by trying to be good, trying to do the right thing, so that I wouldn’t upset God or my parents.” This shaped her into a person who wants to do right by others, she said; it was also one of the reasons that she made so many movies so quickly. “Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me,” she once told Vanity Fair. In 2018, she dropped her representation at Creative Artists Agency and took a break from acting. Soon afterward, she started her production company with Ciarrocchi. They called it Excellent Cadaver, after a Mafia term, cadaveri eccellenti, for a hit on a high-profile figure. “I think there was a part of me that just wanted to execute that part of me,” Lawrence has said, alluding to her hyper, embarrassing (her words!) celebrity avatar.

“It’s always mystified me,” Justine Ciarrocchi said, of her friend’s process. “It’s almost spiritual. Her fuel is empathy and abandon—if she’s too studied, she can’t drop in.” Foster also saw a crucial unknowing quality in Lawrence’s approach. “I frame it as somebody who has some great, almost ancestral emotional wounds, but who isn’t a hundred per cent clear intellectually about what they are,” she said. “She plays characters who aren’t necessarily aware of their triggers, the psychology underpinning everything. She gives this magical, mesmerizing, deep performance that comes from a place I’m not sure she understands.” Stone invoked a theatre adage: If an actor is onstage with a cat, who are you going to watch—the actor or the cat? “The audience would watch the cat,” Stone explained, “because it’s going to respond genuinely in the moment, while the actors are still acting. It’s that quality. Jen’s the cat.”

I asked her about Botox and fillers. Even thirtysomethings these days are getting facelifts; not only celebrities but ordinary people with enough money and vanity sometimes appear mysteriously but distinctly “refreshed.” Lawrence didn’t want to get fillers, she said, because they show on camera. She gets Botox, but she has to be able to use her forehead and to play people who don’t have access to celebrity dermatology. Mostly joking, I asked if she’d had the seemingly ubiquitous new style of facelift done. “No,” she said. “But, believe me, I’m gonna!”

Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark

She has been cast in maternal roles since her teens. Now, playing a mother for the first time since becoming one, she has chosen the part of a woman pushed past the edge of sanity.

www.newyorker.com