Why Jennifer Lawrence left Hollywood: “I’m sick of me, too”
There was a period in the 2010s when Jennifer Lawrence was everywhere – falling down the stairs on her way to collect an Oscar, flirting with Jack Nicholson on the red carpet, and headlining pretty much every major film release. There were the Hunger Games and X-Men franchises, of course, as well as several high-profile, auteur-driven gambles like David O Russell’s American Hustle, Susanne Bier’s Serena, and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!
Aside from being a masterful actor who seemed to have exploded onto the scene out of nowhere in Debra Granik’s 2010 thriller Winter’s Bone, Lawrence made constant headlines because she possesses an absurd level of charisma. She has the ability to make herself seem like a klutzy underdog who doesn’t know how to walk in heels while maintaining the movie star glamour of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
After several years of wall-to-wall JLaw coverage, however, she seemed to disappear as quickly as she appeared. It was around the time that Mother! and Red Sparrow came out in the late 2010s, two films that typified her filmography. One was a completely bonkers art project, and the other was a run-of-the-mill thriller that didn’t quite stick the landing. Aside from a peripheral role in the 2021 satire Don’t Look Up, she did something that she hadn’t done since before Winter’s Bone – kept a low profile.
When most actors disappear from the public consciousness, it’s because they made some career miscalculations that led to an unofficial demotion. Geena Davis didn’t elect to get knocked off the A-list, but a combination of a costly box office bomb and industry sexism turned her into a much less in-demand actor than she had been a year before. Meg Ryan faced a similar trajectory.
In the case of Lawrence, however, ducking out of the spotlight had more to do with reclaiming her career than losing control over it. “I had let myself get hijacked,” she said in a 2022 interview with the New York Times, revealing that many of the scripts she would have been interested in weren’t even making it to her desk because her representatives were steering her toward big-budget franchise movies. “I felt like more of a celebrity than an actor,” she explained, “Cut off from my creativity, my imagination.”
She fired her representatives shortly after finishing X-Men: Dark Phoenix in 2018, took some time off, moved to New York, and took stock of her career. In a 2019 interview on the Naked podcast with journalist Catt Sadler, she revealed that she had felt that her fame was getting exhausting for everyone. “I felt like it was important for everybody,” she said of her decision to step back from public life. “They needed a break from me; I needed a break from them… I was like, ‘I get it, I hear you, and I understand it. I’m sick of me, too.”
When she started acting again, she not only took control over which roles she chose, but the movies themselves. She has produced seven projects since 2022, including the drama Causeway, in which she plays a veteran struggling with PTSD, and No Hard Feelings, a comedy in which she plays a woman in her late twenties who is hired to help a teenager break out of his shell.
She will also be producing and starring in the upcoming Lynne Ramsay horror movie Die, My Love, suggesting that she has no plans to return to the big-budget action phase of her career. It’s an impressive professional turnaround for an actor who is barely in her mid-thirties.
