Jennifer Lawrence says she felt her 'craft suffering' after The Hunger Games
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The odds weren't always in Jennifer Lawrence's favor following her turn as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games franchise.
The Oscar winner admitted that the blockbuster role affected her craft during Variety's latest Actors on Actors series, which paired her for a conversation with Viola Davis. When the first film debuted in 2012, Lawrence told Davis, "I couldn't really be an observer of life because everybody was observing me. I could feel my craft suffering. And I didn't know how to fix it."
"I was scrambling," she continued, "trying to fix it by saying yes to this movie and then trying to counteract it with that movie. And not realizing that what I had to do was no movies until something spoke to me."
Murray Close/Lionsgate Jennifer Lawrence in 'The Hunger Games'
Between the release of the first film and its sequel, 2013's Catching Fire, Lawrence starred in titles like House at the End of the Street, The Devil You Know, and Silver Linings Playbook, which earned her an Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards. She wrapped up the franchise, based on the Suzanne Collins novel series, by 2015 with Mockingjay Part 2.
Lawrence looked back at her time on the franchise with fondness, calling it an "awesome responsibility." She told Davis — who is set to join the Hunger Games universe in the forthcoming prequel film Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes — that at the time, "nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work."
"We were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead," Lawrence said. "And it just makes me so happy every single time I see a movie come out that just blows through every one of those beliefs, and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies. To keep certain people in the same positions that they've always been in."
Lawrence recently reminisced about her time on set, revealing last month that she and costars Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth would often get drunk and high together after intense press events and premieres. "The boys and I would always go back to our hotel and just drink whiskey and get stoned," she said. "My mother-in-law's going to love this. I don't do it anymore; I'm a mom!"
Watch Lawrence and Davis' Actors on Actors segment above.
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