Jennifer Lawrence Took A Break From Acting Because She Thought ‘Everybody Had Gotten Sick Of Me’

After starring in hit after hit and winning an Academy Award for her efforts, Jennifer Lawrence had a rough 2016 through 2019. She starred in two little-loved X-Men movies (X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, the most contractually obligated movie of all-time); Passengers and Red Sparrow were quickly forgotten; and while mother! has its passionate defenders, it also received a rare “F” CinemaScore grade. Other movies to get an “F” CinemaScore include Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s Disaster Movie and the Lindsay Lohan-starring I Know Who Killed Me. Not ideal company.

Following Dark Phoenix, Lawrence took a hiatus from acting to get married, have a kid, and as she explained to Vanity Fair, re-focus on choosing better projects. “I was not pumping out the quality that I should have,” she said. “I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right. If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’ I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.”

The time away from Hollywood seems to have worked: hype is high for her next movie, Don’t Look Up, where she and Leonardo DiCaprio play scientists who try to save Earth from an approaching comet. Lawrence will also star in an A24 movie, Red, White, and Water; Paolo Sorrentino’s Mob Girl; and possibly a biopic of Theranos founder and con artist Elizabeth Holmes, which is excellent casting. The press tour has been fun, too:

It’s good to have J-Law back.

(Via Vanity Fair)