Jennifer Lawrence: ‘I Was Not Pumping Out the Quality I Should’ve’ with ‘Passengers’ and More

Zack Sharf
·2 min read

Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most beloved actresses worldwide with box office hits (“The Hunger Games” franchise) and an Academy Award for Best Actress (“Silver Linings Playbook”) under her belt, but she’s not without a few misfires. After scoring her fourth Oscar nomination with “Joy,” the actress went on to star in a string of box office disappointments: Morten Tyldum’s “Passengers,” Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!,” Francis Lawrence’s “Red Sparrow,” and the maligned “X-Men” bomb “Dark Phoenix.” It was after these four misses that Lawrence took an acting break, only now emerging with a new A-list project in the form of Adam McKay’s Netflix comedy “Don’t Look Up.”

“I was not pumping out the quality that I should have,” Lawrence told Vanity Fair about the movies that led to her stepping away from the spotlight. “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?'”

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Lawrence continued, “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.”

Justine Polsky, Lawrence’s longtime best friend and producer partner, added, “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.”

Lawrence is now remerging with “Don’t Look Up,” in which she plays an astronomy graduate student named Kate Dibiasky who discovers a comet is heading towards our planet and will destroy it. Lawrence stars in the film opposite fellow Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio, plus an ensemble cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, and Mark Rylance. The film stream on Netflix starting December 24 after opening in select theaters December 10.

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