Why the star of a 1986 horror movie had a bone to pick with Jennifer Lawrence: “Chew on that for a while”
Most people became aware of Jennifer Lawrence as the one chosen to bring Katniss Everdeen to the big screen for the 2012 adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ first book in The Hunger Games series, which was either going to make or break her.
Fortunately, it was the former, and Lawrence is now a huge name with plenty of successful movies and franchises under her belt, but the world of Panem continues to hang over her career.
In 2022, she sat down with the great Viola Davis as part of Variety’s ‘Actors on Actors’ series, the latter of whom was there to promote her film The Woman King, and spoke about the responsibility of being the female lead in an action movie.
This prompted Lawrence to reflect on the franchise that made her name and this now-infamous assessment. “I remember when I was doing Hunger Games, nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work,” she claimed, “We were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”
As you can imagine, this rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, many of whom were quick to point out that Lawrence was way off the mark, citing Ellen Ripley in Alien, The Bride in Kill Bill, Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider movies to note that action movie history is full of iconic female leads.
Even when a woman isn’t the main focus of the story, as with Trinity in The Matrix, they’ve still been able to break out and establish themselves in a male-dominant world. It’s possible that Lawrence meant that she was the first young woman to lead an action movie aimed at teenage audiences, but even that claim is spurious at best.
One person that nobody expected to weigh in on this debate was Caroline Williams, best known for her role as Vanita ‘Stretch’ Brock in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, who took to Twitter to express her displeasure at Lawrence’s comments. She posted a gif of her character, covered in blood and holding a chainsaw over her head, with the caption, “Hey, #JenniferLawrence. This was 1986… Chew on that for awhile [sic]”.
This puts us as observers in a rather awkward spot; on the one hand, it’s good to see an actor standing up for herself and her colleagues against a claim made by a far more famous individual. On the other hand, while The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 certainly has action elements, but nobody is rushing to put it in the same category as The Hunger Games.
While I’m sure Lawrence meant no harm by her statement, she did miss out on the chance to promote a real issue in the action movie sphere. While female leads aren’t uncommon, female action directors definitely are, and with The Woman King, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (and written by Dana Stevens), would have been a much nicer topic to celebrate.
