The “crazy” Oscar-winning performance that inspired Jennifer Lawrence to act
As a little girl, Jennifer Lawrence was the performer in her family. She would stage little plays for her parents and big brothers, and from a very young age, was adamant that acting was the only thing that made sense to her.
Having said that, the Hunger Games star has admitted that her household wasn’t exactly an artistic one, so it took everyone by surprise when she was plucked from obscurity at 14 by a talent scout in New York City’s Union Square. The family, who hail from Kentucky, were on a trip to the big city, and Lawrence once admitted to 60 Minutes, “I didn’t even know what a talent scout was. I just thought he was some random guy with a camera.”
Suddenly, the young blonde girl with no formal acting training was travelling around New York City to meet agents, and soon after that, she found herself being put forward for commercial auditions. It wasn’t long before she began booking small jobs, and her family was forced to reckon with the idea that she could really make a go of this. After some long, intense discussions, it was decided that they would roll the dice, and Lawrence moved to Los Angeles with her mum. In the back of her mind, she simply admitted thinking, “OK, if I don’t make it by 18, I’ll go back to Kentucky and do something else.”
Of course, it turned out there was no need for Lawrence to go back home. She was such a prodigious talent that she became a sitcom regular at 16 and an Oscar nominee at 20. It was a stratospheric rise for someone who only decided in her early teens that she wanted to take acting seriously as a potential profession. Usually, such decisions are provoked by an external force, but for Lawrence it was the feeling she had inside when she watched one performance and decided, “I want to do that, too.”
Charlize Theron’s fiercely moving, yet simultaneously terrifying, turn as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’ 2003 biopic Monster, didn’t just get an Oscar, it made an Oscar-winner out of Lawrence. Theron was physically transformed to look more like the abused sex worker who took revenge on male society by murdering seven of her johns. This entailed putting on 30 pounds in weight, shaving her eyebrows, and wearing prosthetic teeth, it didn’t just render her unrecognisable, but it allowed her to strip away herself and become the character more fully than ever before.
The Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ was a noted achievement for Theron, and one that was richly deserved. It is still considered her signature role to this day. It was the physical and mental transformation for a role that seemed to inspire Lawrence the most. Both naturally cast in leading roles in their youth, and celebrated for their looks, Lawrence saw Theron reject those stereotypes to really deliver a truly gifted acting performance.
“I want to play a character I’ve never been before,” the No Hard Feelings star once revealed. “A crazy serial killer like Charlize Theron in Monster.”
Then, with hilarious specificity, she added, “I’d love to have to shave my head.”
Theron went on to star in the 2008 drama The Burning Plain, the directorial debut of Babel’s Guillermo Arriaga, and saw the filmmaker using his signature non-linear style to devastating effect. With multiple time jumps, a young actress was needed to play the teenage Theron. Arriaga turned to a young actor named Jennifer Lawrence in an enjoyably cosmic turn of events.
Lawrence would get to play the younger version of her hero before going on to emulate her at the Oscars for Silver Linings Playbook.
