Jennifer Lawrence Says Adele Told Her Not to Do ‘Passengers’: ‘I Should Have Listened’

Ryan Lattanzio
·2 min read
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Jennifer Lawrence is making her indie comeback with the upcoming Apple Original Film “Causeway.” That’s after some significant time away from small movies after her “Winter’s Bone” Oscar-nominated debuted. In 2021, Jennifer Lawrence led the cosmic Netflix hit “Don’t Look Up” and, before that, hung up her blue X-Men garb in 2019’s “Dark Phoenix.” Now, she’s steering back toward small-scale drama with Lila Neugebauer’s story of a U.S. soldier bringing PTSD back home from Afghanistan.

While “mother!” flopped and “Red Sparrow” and “Joy” certainly didn’t pop, one movie Lawrence definitely regrets? “Passengers,” the 2016 sci-fi two-hander she starred in opposite Chris Pratt as colony-bound spacecraft riders traveling 60 lightyears from Earth — only to become the only two to emerge from hibernation 90 years before their co-travelers. Reviews were bad, and the relationship bordered on creepy in how Pratt’s character manipulates Lawrence’s into becoming his lone companion in space.

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In a new sit-down with The New York Times, Lawrence said it was her friend, the EGOT-nearing pop icon Adele, who told her not to star in the movie, which ended up grossing more than $300 million off its $100 million budget but earned mostly scathing reviews.

She said that after finishing up the “Hunger Games” trilogy in 2015, she started feeling fans’ disillusionment. “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?’”

The one movie that confirmed that was “Passengers.” “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,” Lawrence said. (The article also details an infamous night at the Greenwich Village gay bar Pieces where Lawrence and Adele joined the regular people to sing karaoke.)

In the NYT interview, Lawrence also shared why she left her agency, CAA, in 2018, harking back to a number of the aforementioned films she felt let her and her fans down.

“I felt like more of a celebrity than an actor,” she said, “cut off from my creativity, my imagination.”

She added, “I found out that a lot of filmmakers that I really loved and admired had scripts that weren’t even reaching me,” saying, “I had let myself be hijacked.”

Hence, Lawrence makes a homecoming of sorts with “Causeway,” taking her back to her breakout role in 2010’s “Winter’s Bone,” which earned her her first Best Actress nomination.

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