It’s still amusing to me that Jennifer Lawrence is just openly campaigning for Best Actress this Oscar season. She really wants – and perhaps expects – an Oscar nomination for ‘mother!’, a film which bombed at the box office and was critically savaged as one of the dumbest biblical allegories ever. Still, J-Law is right to campaign – she is beloved by the Academy, and she’s proven time and time again that she can get nominated for sub-par performances. Note: I’m not saying she’s a bad actress, I’m saying that she hasn’t deserved Oscar nominations for a few particular performances, like American Hustle. Anyway, J-Law sat down with The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast and she talked about the nature of celebrity, her hacked nude photos, Harvey Weinstein and more. Some highlights:
She considers David O. Russell her artistic soulmate. “David, still to this day, is the most important relationship in my life, I think. We can be so deeply, deeply honest with each other, in a way that creates amazing art.”
She thinks she was miscast in Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and Joy: “I’m obviously too young for all three.”
The 2014 Cloud hack: “When the hacking thing happened, it was so unbelievably violating that you can’t even put it into words. I think that I’m still actually processing it. When I first found out it was happening, my security reached out to me. It was happening minute-to-minute — it was almost like a ransom situation where they were releasing new ones every hour or so. And, I don’t know, I feel like I got gang-banged by the f–king planet — like, there’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process.”
Why she didn’t sue: “A lot of women were affected, and a lot of them reached out to me about suing Apple or suing [others] — and none of that was gonna really bring me peace, none of that was gonna bring my nude body back to me and Nic [Lawrence’s former boyfriend Nicholas Hoult], the person that they were intended for. It wasn’t gonna bring any of that back. So I wasn’t interested in suing everybody; I was just interested in healing. I think, like, a year and a half ago, somebody said something to me about how I was ‘a good role model for girls,’ and I had to go into the bathroom and sob because I felt like an imposter — I felt like, ‘I can’t believe somebody still feels that way after what happened.’ It’s so many different things to process when you’ve been violated like that.”
On Harvey Weinstein: “I had heard that he was a dog. But he was always almost paternal to me. He was never inappropriate with me. I thought that we had a nice relationship where, when he acted like an a–hole, I called him an a–hole — I actually think the word I used was ‘a sadistic monster’ — but it was just never of that nature, so that was really shocking.”
Whether she has ever been sexually abused: “I had been objectified, I had been, you know, obviously, not paid equally, I had been violated by a hacker, but I have never had a man use his power to sexually abuse me.”
How she ended up dating Darren Aronofsky: “I had a crush on him when he pitched to me and that was like a year before we started rehearsing, but he was a professional, which only made it worse for me. So we just kind of formed a friendship. He knew how I felt, he never told me how he felt — I mean, I assumed — but we just formed a friendship, and then the friendship turned into a partnership for the movie once we started working, and then, when the movie was done, I was like, ‘Alright, you’re my boyfriend!’ And he was like, ‘Alright, I’m your boyfriend.'”
The Harvey Weinstein stuff is so…disgusting, and yet I am still horrifyingly fascinated by the victimology, how he chose victims, and who he chose. I believe her when she says he was “almost paternal” towards her and that she had no idea of the extent of his crimes, but I’ll always wonder how she managed to avoid his predatory intentions. As for what she says about David O. Russell… no. Just no. I don’t think DOR is a Weinstein-level predator, but the guy has issues and he is well-known for being abusive to below-the-line workers and actors. She needs to be exposed to better directors. And Darren Aronofsky… ugh.
Update: Ooooh, apparently Jennifer and Darren Aronofsky have split. Awkward timing, right in the middle of her Oscar campaign. But I’m glad they’re done.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid.
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