The scene that changed Jennifer Lawrence forever: “The worst feeling I’ve ever had”
When actors sign on for a role they know will be physically and/or emotionally draining, they have a decent idea of what they’re getting themselves into. However, Jennifer Lawrence was left so traumatised by one performance that she never wants to do anything like it again.
A surprisingly definitive call for an actor who was only born in 1990 and made their screen debut in 2008, but if anything, it just goes to show how deeply she was affected by the production responsible. It wasn’t just a personal thing, either, because many audience members would be in full agreement and staunch support that they don’t want to see it repeated.
Of course, it was a supremely challenging role that first brought Lawrence to mainstream prominence when Winter’s Bone served as both her breakthrough and her first Academy Award-nominated outing, but that was an altogether different kind of brutal. As a major star, she’s in a position to flat-out reject anything she doesn’t feel like doing, which ensures Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! will remain a one-off.
One of the most polarising films in recent memory, the auteur’s psychological horror was widely praised by many and vehemently decried by an equal amount of people, splitting opinion straight down the middle with its nightmarish realisations of domesticity, parenthood, and spirituality.
Anyone who’s seen the film knows fine well there are no prizes for guessing which scene drove Lawrence to the brink, with the climax jaw-dropping on several different levels. Whether that’s good or bad remains entirely in the eye of the beholder, but one thing that can’t be argued is that Mother! ends on a seriously fucked up note.
“It was the scene where I woke up to a surprise and ran downstairs,” Lawrence explained at the Toronto International Film Festival. “That was the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my life. It was awful, and I don’t know if I would ever do such a movie again.”
Needless to say, the actor’s title character sprinting downstairs to a packed full of interlopers who pass around her newborn infant until it’s killed would be bad enough, but then they go ahead and start eating it. It was nothing if not a bold way to end the movie, but with an epic sense of understatement, it wasn’t for everyone.
As it turns out, Lawrence was firmly among that number despite being there on set, but once was more than enough. Hopefully, watching a gaggle of strangers chow down on a child isn’t the sort of story that comes across one’s desk any more than once, anyway, so the Oscar winner should realistically be able to sleep easy knowing that Mother! was strictly a one-time deal.
