Jennifer Lawrence tells Viola Davis weight loss was the “biggest conversation” around The Hunger Games casting
Jennifer Lawrence and Viola Davis talk the biggest hindrances to the craft of acting in Variety's Actors on Actors conversation
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Jennifer Lawrence and Viola Davis are both critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning actors who also happen to have ample experience with blockbuster and franchise filmmaking. In Lawrence’s case, she’s been open about how franchise films affected her career as a whole. In her Actors on Actors conversation with Davis (via Variety), she elaborates on some of the hardships of her roles in X-Men and The Hunger Games.
Of the superhero series, she admits, “It’s hard to not have that perception of the movie that’s like, ‘Oh, well, it’s just one of those.’” Lawrence adds, “Especially when you’re painted blue with scales on your face. If you start thinking, ‘I look ridiculous, I feel ridiculous,’ there’s nowhere to go.”
Lawrence calls The Hunger Games “an awesome responsibility,” reflecting, “Those books were huge, and I knew that the audience was children. I remember the biggest conversation was ‘How much weight are you going to lose?’ Along with me being young and growing and not able to be on a diet, I don’t know if I want all of the girls who are going to dress up as Katniss to feel like they can’t because they’re not a certain weight. And I can’t let that seep into my brain either.”
“How much of the business has infiltrated your love of the work?” Davis ask. Lawrence remarks that the runaway success of The Hunger Games means she “couldn’t really be an observer of life because everybody was observing me.” She shares, “I could feel my craft suffering. And I didn’t know how to fix it. I was scrambling, 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.”
Doing press and interviews is also a hindrance to the craft because, Lawrence says, “I’m supposed to be a mirror. I’m supposed to be a vessel.” Meanwhile, Davis cites some of her training at Julliard (“Or should I say the jail yard?”) as having held her back, focusing too much on “technical proficiency.”
“[No] one wants to see a play or a movie and look at technical proficiency; you want a human experience. You want to feel less alone. They don’t get at that,” Davis explains. Citing teaching techniques like putting a pencil in students’ mouths to adjust their tongue positioning, she says, “When it gets like that, and you leave yourself and your soul behind, you’re not an artist.”
“And on top of that, it’s Eurocentric training,” Davis adds. “So when you’re studying all those classics, it’s clear what all of those characters look like —and that’s not me. So then what am I supposed to do with me? What am I supposed to do with my Blackness? What am I supposed to do with my deep voice and my wide nose?”
Luckily, Davis and Lawrence have found individual success (and critical acclaim with this year’s films The Woman King and Causeway) in spite of these particular challenges, and both praise each other for the beauty and humanity of their work. Their full Actors on Actors conversation can be seen on Variety here.
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“It’s hard to not have that perception of the movie that’s like, ‘Oh, well, it’s just one of those.’” Lawrence adds, “Especially when you’re painted blue with scales on your face. If you start thinking, ‘I look ridiculous, I feel ridiculous,’ there’s nowhere to go.”You could always take the tens of millions of dollars and then pout about it for years and do a subpar job that drags everybody else down. Ie, how a true artist responds to such roles.
“I could feel my craft suffering.” 🤮
I always wonder why people like you come here if the content makes you puke. It’s like the meme about the guy who feeds his cats to the coyotes.
Not the biggest cat fan for obvious reasons, but glad I missed that meme!
I mean, you get what you get with a series of videos called “Actors on Actors.” What were people expecting?
Porn, probably.
That’s “Actors in Actors.”
They act like these actors are coming to their work, knocking the mouse head off and forcing their opinions on them.
Damn who hurt you
“[No] one wants to see a play or a movie and look at technical proficiency; you want a human experience.”
Don’t tell that to everyone jizzing all over themselves over the technical mastery of Avatar 2…
Lawrence also made one awkward choice of words that makes it sound like she thinks Katniss was the first ever female action hero, so that’s not going over well.
Yeah that was a pretty dumb comment, then again she once said she doesn’t like black and white films, odds are she’s seen Coffy with Pam Grier is unlikely.
she once said she doesn’t like black and white films 30% of millennials have never watched a black and white film all the way through. Probably even higher for Gen Z.
I am aware but most people aren’t so gleeful. The full Lawrence quote is that I don’t like black and white film, silent films fucking suck. Now I’m gonna sound terribly old, but if you sit someone down and make them watch Safety Last with Harold Lloyd they will have fun.
So most millinnials have seen a black and white film? That’s not surprising. I wonder what percentage of gen-xers have seen a silent film.
Youth Pastor: “Let me tell you about a ‘female hero’ who saw some ‘action’. Her name was Mary Magdalene, and she…”
Everybody has their favorite Mary in the Bible, and mine is definitely whore Mary!
They were supposed to be hungry! It’s in the title.
Exactly! Katniss was supposed to be better-fed than most in District 12 because of the game she poached but it was a major plot point in the book how her potential in the games was underestimated because she was scrawny.
I think for 90% of roles weight loss is unnecessary but I feel like the conversation that Lawrence always missed about Katniss is that because of the severe economic inequality of her district there Katniss’ family didn’t have access to food and that’s why the character was so thin.
Now were the producers actually concerned with that aspect of the plot when they asked her to lose weight? Probably not and the weight loss ended up not being necessary in my opinion based on how they did the adaptation. And it ended up being the right move.
But I have just noticed that Lawerence seems to equate all weight loss for roles as bad but it’s also a weird take from someone whose body basically meets the ideal in every way so her refusal to lose weight also rings as false to me, like it’s a show. Not to say that thin people don’t feel pressure to be more in thin in Hollywood but it’s just weird her framing of it. I don’t even know why is bothers me coming from her and it’s possible I am being unfair.
Yeah it’s one of those things where it’s a reasonable discussion to have, and even people who generally seem to fit into the ideal (especially women) still struggle with… but a young, relatively thin, attractive person is never really going to be the one who should be leading that conversation.I will say watching The Hunger Games she always looked way too healthy to be from Dystopian West Virginia and having her leaner and more gaunt could have added to the performance, but A) she’s got a point that someone young probably shouldn’t be doing that stuff (and Christian Bale probably shouldn’t either) and B) some stuff you just let go in movies, like being able to find parking easily or that everyone still looks pretty great even if they’re smudged with mud or have been fighting Orcs nonstop for a month.
Bale knows the health risks of losing and gaining weight. He does it anyway because he is dedicated to his craft. Some people just take their job very seriously. Bale would even speak in his American accent for behind the scenes sometimes. Man yells at lighting workers for ruining his scenes. When He was called Fatman on Batman he went right back to work to get into shape. Bale goes 110% on the job. You won’t get that commitment out of other actors.
I can’t verify this but apparently Christian Bale wanted to lose even more weight for The Mechanic but doctors made it clear the risks were too much and he was already pushing it.
I think you’re being fair enough. But then this actor isn’t anything special, imo, and I’ve heard she’s very smart. These interview answers don’t bear that out.
The more we learn about Jennifer Lawrence, the more it feels like absolutely everything she says and does is just for show and her aw shucks regular girl thing was fake as all hell.
it’s not like they cast everyone around her to look starving from her district, they wanted her to be thinner just to be thinner lol. And let’s not tell her what pressures she feels about her body, I don’t even think us common folks who have to deal with day to day body image issues can even fathom what is projected onto her body.
I mean, it ain’t called The Well-Fed Games.
it’s also a weird take from someone whose body basically meets the ideal in every way so her refusal to lose weight also rings as false to me I suspect she was told to lose weight between X-Men: First Class and Hunger Games, and it’s been a sore point with her ever since.
It may be that First Class was the last time she felt her body was relatively normal, and not “Hollywood normal”.
I mean yes. But considering it was a movie involving children and child/young actors, any push to have the characters be realistically emaciated/thin would be grossly unethical.
I literally said it was the right move.
Funny how these “you need to be thin bc your character is malnourished” requests never seem to extend to giving the actor bad teeth and skin.
That’s fair. I will say I did notice that on Game of Thrones when John Snow had perfect teeth but the rest of the dudes at the wall didn’t? I have started to notice that sort of thing more.
The teeth thing drives me nuts bc it’s such an easy fix.
I feel like people are going into this interview kinda anti-Lawrence but I thought that Lawrence saying she “couldn’t really be an observer of life because everybody was observing me” is a really interesting and well-put statement. Between the sudden fame, acclaim, multiple franchises, and the weird backlash that came from her quirkiness, not to mention the nude picture leak, I feel like it would’ve been pretty hard to keep growing as an actress. Props to her for taking some time off and coming back to it fresh.
I am not sure if it is any consolation, but I imagine the same kind of conversations are probably becoming at least a little more common for male actors. Like I am sure if Hugh Jackman showed up for the first day of filming of Days of Future Past and he wasn’t completely shredded with single digit percent body fat there would be comments and conversations.
Doing press and interviews is also a hindrance to the craft because, Lawrence says, “I’m supposed to be a mirror. I’m supposed to be a vessel.”I wasn’t sure what she meant by this—it sounded entitled, honestly—until I read the full interview for context:
“For my experience, the biggest hindrance to my craft has been press, doing interviews. Every time I do an interview, I think, “I can’t do this to myself again.” I really can’t. I’m always very self-conscious of my intellect because I didn’t finish school. I dropped out of middle school…I don’t want anybody to know, or think they know, what I’m like. I’m supposed to be a mirror. I’m supposed to be a vessel. You shouldn’t look at me and remember that I got married in Rhode Island a few years ago and that my husband’s an art dealer. I feel like I lose so much control over my craft every time I have to do press for a movie and I’m selling this,”Another interesting comment JLaw made was that during the peak of her fame, she couldn’t escape being observed, especially by the public, and it put too much of her attention back on herself, hindering her ability to observe the world and draw inspiration from it.
Thanks for posting longer quotes from the interview (I suppose I could click the link myself but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). It’s kinda funny/sad to see her say she feels self-conscious about her intellect and that doing press is a hindrance after seeing comments above saying she comes off dumb and fake—can’t say she’s not perceptive.
Funny to see Viola Davis talking shit about Julliard. I’m sure the technical knowledge is useful but at the same time that place sounds so rigid and old-fashioned (which has its charms as well as faults). I think of Gillian Jacobs mentioning on Comedy Bang Bang that they teach everyone there to talk like Frasier.
Glenn Howerton from It’s Always Sunny has mentioned how much he had to unlearn from his time at Juilliard.
Acting is one of those professions, like teaching, where everyone thinks they can do it. So when someone talks about struggling with their job as an actor, the reaction is, “Suck it up and stop complaining. Be thankful you’ve got your job.” The thing is, not many people can perform at her level. Even if she’s the worst actress in Hollywood, that’s like being the worst player on a professional sports team. They’re still one of the best in the world at it.
I don’t think I can teach because I can do.
Exactly my point.