‘No Hard Feelings’ Actor Laura Benanti Gushes Over ‘Funny’ and ‘Silly’ Jennifer Lawrence: ‘She’s Not a Princess’
Jennifer Lawrence may be an Oscar-winning actor, but she hasn’t let all that fame and fortune go to her head.
“You immediately forget she’s a movie star when you meet her,” says Laura Benanti, who appears opposite Lawrence in the new R-rated comedy “No Hard Feelings.” “She’s so down to earth.”
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Lawrence stars in “No Hard Feelings” as an Uber driver who agrees to date a wealthy couple’s (Benanti and Matthew Broderick) socially awkward 19-year-old son (Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a car.
“Sure, at first I was nervous because it’s like, ‘How are you so beautiful?’” Benanti said of Lawrence. “But then I was immediately laughing with her. She’s so funny, silly and a hard worker. She’s not a princess. She is comfortable being uncomfortable.”
In one much-buzzed-about scene, Lawrence is completely naked during an epic fight on the beach. “She’s hilarious and she’s a Dior model who is like a full dummy in the best possible way,” Benanti says. “During a break, she’d be like, ‘I’m going to get grilled cheese. You want one?’ I was like, ‘If that’s how you look by eating grilled cheese, yes, I’ll some, please.’”
While the film is R-rated, Benanti’s character doesn’t take part in the movie’s raunchy moments. Even so, the Tony-winner said, “My parents absolutely are not allowed to see it. I would die immediately. I would crumble to dust.”
Benanti spoke with Variety just a couple of weeks after an exclusive report that she and Sterling K. Brown starred in a reading of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Brown took on the role of Randle P. McMurphy while Benanti played the infamous Nurse Ratched. While producers hope to bring the production to Broadway, Benanti says she is not attached.
“For that piece to work now, Nurse Ratched can’t be the villain,” Benanti says. “At least in the play, not necessarily the movie, the amount of misogyny and sexual violence toward women, I cannot root for those men completely. It’s like everyone is a protagonist and every one is antagonist.”
“When you really look at the amount that this woman has to endure in this facility from these men, it’s not like she’s just out of nowhere being awful,” she continued. “What’s interesting to me is a version of her where she thinks she is doing the right thing and she’s not just being a punitive monster. It would be de-villainizing her and humanizing her and finding a way for it to be less black and white.”
“No Hard Feelings” is in theaters now.
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