Jennifer Lawrence Opens up About Taking a Break and Coping With the 'Low Point' in Her Career
Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence started her illustrious career with $2.97 billion worldwide grossing monstrous blockbuster Hunger Games franchise. She went on to get four Academy Awards nominations and won an Oscar for Best Actress (2013) for her role in Silver Linings Playbook. However, after a string of unsuccessful films including Passengers, Mother!, Red Sparrow, and the 12th X-Men film, Dark Phoenix, Lawrence confessed in an exclusive with Vanity Fair in 2021 that she was disappointed with herself. “I was not pumping out the quality that I should have, 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."
She continued to explain - "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.”
Known to be a social media recluse, the Joy actress completely vanished from the entertainment industry for a while, only to return with the dramatic dark satire Don't Look Up alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. Justine Polsky, who is her longtime best friend and producer explained her absence, “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.”
“I don’t want to offend anyone,” Lawrence said back then. “I don’t want to look stupid. I don’t want to be a douchebag. Part of me is like ‘Enh, fuck it.’ And then, every once in a while, I’m like, ‘God, I’m a loser.’ You think that’ll go away when I’m 30?” Before taking a break, the Like Crazy actress confessed that she felt stuck with obligation, “The attention on me was so high and extreme that, in a bizarre way, the set had become a great escape. Everybody treats you normally. It’s not like you walk into hair and makeup and people are like, ‘Oh, my God!’ But you get burnt out. Eventually, I had to ask myself, Am I saying yes because I want to go to work the next day? Or am I doing this because I want to make this movie?”
Opening up about her career choices to Oprah Winfrey in 2017 with Hollywood Reporter, Lawrence revealed that she would have become an interior designer if not an actor, “I thought for a while maybe I could be an interior designer — that was the only job I knew about because my mom was friends with an interior designer.” The Serena actress also shared that she never imagined herself to become so successful, “It’s not something I knew about myself until I started becoming successful, and then I wanted to become more successful,” she said. “I’d make a great movie, and then I’d want to make more great movies; I’d make money, I’d want to make more money. It was a mindset I wasn’t even aware I had until my early 20s.”
