When Jennifer Lawrence accidentally mooned Francis Ford Coppola: “My whole ass was out”
During her rapid ascent up the Hollywood ladder, where she seemingly came out of nowhere to be crowned as one of Hollywood’s biggest, most bankable, and most talented young stars, Jennifer Lawrence had a habit of tripping herself up, both verbally and physically.
Whereas many actors have been media trained to within an inch of their lives to avoid making a faux pas in public, Lawrence couldn’t seem to go anywhere without tripping, stumbling, falling over, or putting her foot in her mouth. She took it all in her stride, though, even if her first encounter with one of cinema’s greatest-ever directors was one she’d rather forget.
Lawrence only had three film credits under her belt before her breakthrough role in Winter’s Bone, which hit theatres in June 2010 when she was only 19 years old. It got her on the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Actress’, and it quickly became apparent that she wasn’t going to be another flash in the pan.
By age 25, she’d won an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, accrued four nominations in total, claimed three Golden Globe wins, and headlined the multi-billion Hunger Games franchise. She was at the peak of the A-list yet remained prone to the odd gaffe. Most notably on her first trip to Paris, when she spied Francis Ford Coppola at a restaurant.
A five-time Oscar winner responsible for the Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, among others, Lawrence confessed to Jimmy Fallon that even though Coppola was completely bemused when she said her hellos, it took an awful lot of courage-plucking for her to get that far, to begin with.
“I have to, or I’ll regret it for the rest of my life,” she said. “He was with a huge table of people. So I started walking, and I noticed I was barefoot, but I thought they probably won’t notice. I introduced myself and said, ‘I’m such a huge fan: The Godfather, wow’. I introduced myself to the whole table: ‘Hi, I’m Jennifer Lawrence’, and they had no idea who I was.”
That might have been embarrassing enough in itself, but worse was to come. “I went back to the table, and my entire dress was unzipped, and my thong was out,” she explained. “So I was barefoot, and my whole ass was out.” It wasn’t the best way to make a first impression on a storied veteran, even if Coppola and his associates remained completely unaware they were talking to a fellow Hollywood high-flyer.
If there’s anything worse than trying to strike up a conversation with a hero, idol, and all-around icon of the movie business and failing miserably, then doing it with your arse accidentally hanging out has got to be up there.
