The novel “Die, My Love,” by the Argentinean writer Ariana Harwicz, is narrated by a wife and new mother who is living in rural France and seems to be losing her mind. Motherhood has inserted an immersion blender into her psyche: lust, repulsion, pleasure, and doom swirl into a single mess. She calls herself a “sodomising rodent” with “bullet-wounds for eyes,” and thinks, “When I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung.” One night, standing in the cold, staring at her family through a sliding door, she thinks, “I’ll stop trying to draw blood from a stone. I’ll contain my madness, I’ll use the bathroom. I’ll put my baby to sleep, jerk off my man and postpone my rebellion in favor of a better life.” She’s joking.
Martin Scorsese saw a brief review of the novel in the Guardian some years ago and decided to pick up a copy. He found it to be a “powerful mosaic of the mind,” he told me recently. Scorsese is a member of a book club of sorts, with a few other filmmakers, who read with an eye toward adaptation. For “Die, My Love,” he imagined casting Jennifer Lawrence in the lead. He’d been amazed by her performance in Darren Aronofsky’s bewildering 2017 fantasia, “Mother!” In that surreal film—it’s like an allegory set inside an oil painting—Lawrence plays a woman living with her poet husband in an old farmhouse, which is gradually, then apocalyptically, invaded by strangers. “She really is feeling everything that’s happening, in what appears to be a dream of some kind,” Scorsese said.
He and Lawrence had discussed adaptations before. They considered “The Awakening,” Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel of female liberation, which ends with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, walking into the sea. But that felt safe. “What’s the challenge?” Scorsese had thought. “Die, My Love” was like “The Awakening” if it began with Edna already underwater. “I said, ‘You know what? This is a challenge,’ ” he recalled telling Lawrence. “ ‘This is the kind of thing you should be doing. Go take a chance. Knock any sense of a comfortable character off the board and just go for it.’ ”
Lawrence became a star fifteen years ago, at age nineteen, with “Winter’s Bone,” a rural noir in which she plays a hardscrabble daughter of the Ozarks. She has since received four Oscar nominations, winning once, for “Silver Linings Playbook,” the first of three movies she filmed as David O. Russell’s muse. She anchored one of the century’s most durable movie franchises, “The Hunger Games,” playing the inadvertent hero Katniss Everdeen in an adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s Y.A. series about teen-agers who are forced into gladiatorial combat by a fascist government. For a time, she was the highest-paid actress in the world.
But her public image—as earthy and lowbrow as her movies were alternately fantastical and prestigious—has always threatened to overshadow what she does onscreen. She proved irresistible to the star-making machine: an Oscar contender who joked about butt plugs, a blonde from the Real America who could give Bacall in a ball gown but got famous for a movie in which she skins a squirrel. The idea of Jennifer Lawrence became almost a cultural fetish, the nation’s four-quadrant fantasy of a carefree, potty-mouthed darling. The apex of her fame coincided with an era when people said “personal brand” without irony, and when converting a young woman’s identity into a product was not just the province of Hollywood but the basis upon which entire social-media platforms thrived.
Lawrence roughly fit the archetype of the cool girl, as it was famously characterized (by an unreliable psychopath) in “Gone Girl,” the Gillian Flynn novel: a “hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2.” In a Rolling Stone profile from 2012, Lawrence asks the reporter, “Are you hungry? Because I have a whole burger-fries-Budweiser fantasy going on.” The magazine proclaimed her the “coolest chick in Hollywood.” When she accepted her Oscar for Best Actress, in 2013, she tripped going up the stairs to the stage, and the public swooned. A year later, she tripped at the ceremony again, while walking the red carpet. Suddenly, to some, her persona seemed like an act.
She was in sixteen movies in six years, many of which were not as good as the work she did in them. (A Globe and Mail critic wrote, of her performance in an early-career horror flick, “She improves the script by transcending it, and steals the picture by abandoning it.”) Once or twice, as in the misbegotten space romance “Passengers”—Lawrence had to fall in, then out, then back in love with Chris Pratt, even after finding out that he’d more or less killed her—the movie brought the work down to its level. She has since slowed down, making about one film a year. She’s thirty-five now, out of the ingénue phase and at an age when women in Hollywood often get relegated to playing moms—making dinner in the background of someone else’s story.
Oddly, though, Lawrence has been regularly cast in maternal roles since her teens. In two early movies, “The Burning Plain” and “The Poker House,” she plays a teen-ager tasked with minding her younger siblings while a wayward mom engages in sexual congress. In “Winter’s Bone,” she tends not only to her siblings but to her mom. In “The Hunger Games,” too, she has an inert mother and a dead father and serves as protector and provider for other kids. Russell cast her as a widow (“Silver Linings Playbook”), a histrionic mother (“American Hustle”), and a self-sacrificing mother of two (“Joy”), all before she turned twenty-five. And then there’s “Mother!” In that one, Lawrence gives birth onscreen only to watch a horde of grasping freaks eat her baby’s dismembered body. (She is basically playing the most faultless of all mothers, Mother Earth.)
Lawrence liked Scorsese’s idea, and put together an adaptation of “Die, My Love” with her production company. (Scorsese is credited as a producer on the film; next year, he’ll direct Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of “What Happens at Night,” by Peter Cameron, which he read immediately after “Die, My Love.”) Lynne Ramsay, the mercurial Scottish filmmaker, signed on to direct, and Robert Pattinson took the part of the husband, called Jackson in the film. Lawrence’s character is named Grace; rural France has been replaced by Montana. The couple moves there while Grace is pregnant, and we briefly see them wild and free before the baby is born. Their relationship breaks down in the postpartum months, as Grace is driven well past the edge of sanity by isolation, sexual rejection, and the stuff of new motherhood—leaking nipples, laundry baskets, the sight of a man who’s been wearing the same disgusting fucking robe every single day. The film takes a shotgun to certain postpartum clichés: Grace doesn’t care about being a picture-perfect mother, and she’s not too touched-out for sex. She walks around with dirty bare feet and keeps her baby up out of boredom and throws herself violently at Jackson, to no avail.
To different viewers, the movie might seem like a sideways romantic drama, a psychological thriller, or a very dark comedy. It is certainly, like Ramsay’s other films—such as “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which centers on a boy who goes on a killing spree, and his parents—a tone poem of sublimated misery. Lawrence’s previous film was the comedy “No Hard Feelings,” in which her character, a dirtbag Montauk townie paid to deflower the nerd son of out-to-lunch parents, drew closer to her public image than anything she’d done before. Now, in “Die My Love,” her role diverges from that persona more than ever. As Grace, she crawls through tall grass, clutching a butcher knife, and wanders under the predawn moonlight, desperate for someone to fuck her, or maybe to behead her. Her eyes yawn open, crackling with static. She vibrates with restlessness and fury. You can see the cognitive distance between her and reality increasing, inch by inch, in her face.
Lawrence has sat for dozens of magazine profiles since she was a teen-ager. She’s drunk cheap bourbon with reporters in her back yard and got in a sauna for scene and color. But she’s become more sparing with press in the past half decade. In late September, she and a publicist sat in a side room at Via Carota, an unflashy but impossibly in-demand celebrity-magnet restaurant in the West Village. I walked in and said hello. Lawrence confessed that, just before she left the house, her too-small mouth guard had got stuck in her mouth. “Can you imagine?” she said. “After ten years of being, like, ‘I used to be folksy, but everyone thought everything was a shtick,’ then I show up for my first day of this, like”—she did a Farrelly-brothers-style impression of clumsy, mouth-guard-wearing Jen. “I was, like, I will do anything to prevent this from happening. It would be like if I tripped and fell on my way into the room.”
Lawrence has a low voice and is beautiful in a manner that feels unstingy. She was dressed like the wealthy millennial mother that she is: a soft red cardigan over a white shirt, a white skirt with a black sweater around her waist, a gold pendant, black sandals. Her long, dark-blond bangs were a little messy. In person, as onscreen, she’s often very still; her face, with its rounded cheekbones and straight planes, will become marble-like and sculptural. Then everything rearranges in a swarm of sudden feeling.
“Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again,’ ” Lawrence told her fellow-actor Viola Davis a few years ago, adding, “I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.” I got the sense that, with me, she was trying to be careful. She seemed conscious of a lesson learned at peak fame: she doesn’t want to be the trick pony; she wants to be the rider holding the reins. Still, frequently, something unbridled would burst through. Soon after I sat down, Lawrence asked me if it was O.K. if she “vaped . . . constantly,” then noted that she’d have to stop in November, when she planned to get her boobs done. (Nicotine constricts blood vessels—bad for tissue healing.) Later, we discussed the cervical details of our respective childbirth experiences, and she cheerfully offered the phrase “huge vagina.”
When I mentioned going through old articles about her, she winced. “Oh, no,” she said. “So hyper. So embarrassing.” I said that it must have been self-alienating to have people demand and obsess over her genuine personality, and then to decide that it was fake. “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she said. The pedestal of fame had felt treacherous and false: “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ ” Lawrence had anticipated the turn in public opinion long before it happened, and rarely felt at ease. “I was young, I lived alone, I was being chased,” she said. Paparazzi followed her when she drove around in Los Angeles; at night, adrenaline threw off her sleep. She had too many projects and was doing too much press, and she felt “pissed,” she said. “I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on ‘S.N.L.’ was spot-on.” (“I’m just, like, a snackaholic,” Grande said, in 2016, on a “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch, sporting a tight dress and a perfectly groomed blond wig. “I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”) But the backlash did make her life seem “uninhabitable,” Lawrence said. “I felt—I didn’t feel, I was, I think—rejected not for my movies, not for my politics, but for me, for my personality.”
It was six weeks after the birth of her first child when Scorsese’s name popped up on her phone. After listening to him describe “Die, My Love,” she ordered a copy and read it right away. “I wasn’t really having a bad postpartum,” she told me. “I had a worse postpartum with my second, but the first time the only thing I was at war with was the rest of the world.” Still, she responded to the protagonist’s loneliness, to the frankness of her insanity and her lack of control.
Lawrence co-founded her production company, in 2018, with a friend, Justine Ciarrocchi, whom she’s known since she was eighteen and just starting to become successful and Ciarrocchi was a twenty-year-old film student. “Die, My Love” felt to them like a Lynne Ramsay movie. Ramsay, whose début feature, “Ratcatcher,” follows a quiet Scottish boy turned accidental murderer, and whose most recent, “You Were Never Really Here,” stars Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatized hit man attempting to rescue a young girl, hadn’t made a movie in eight years. Lawrence and Ciarrocchi courted her via e-mail for months. “I had to find my own way into it,” Ramsay told me. “I saw it as a bit of a love story, a bit of a haunting, a bit about being stuck creatively.” (In the film, Grace is an aspiring novelist, though that detail strained credulity for this writer—we never see books in her house, for one thing.) Ramsay wanted the source of Grace’s agitation to maintain a degree of mystery: “Is it the isolation? Is it that they’re splitting up? Is it the sex?”
Ramsay wrote the script with a pair of playwrights, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch. When Pattinson came on board as Jackson, his presence changed the part. He “defended his role,” Lawrence said, and insisted that Jackson be a forceful and meaningful counterpart to his tornado of a wife. Pattinson saw his character as “a regular guy,” he told me, who may not understand Grace but who stubbornly holds on to his love for her. As an actor, he said, Lawrence “ends up drawing your own performance into areas that you had no idea you would go.” Ramsay had the two leads take interpretive-dance classes, which Pattinson called a “(sort of) fun humiliation ritual.” They shot the movie a year ago, in Calgary, when Lawrence was four months pregnant with her second child, something that made her a little nervous. “When you’re working, you’re manipulating your adrenals, you’re calling up a lot of emotions,” she said. Her husband and son came to stay with her on set. Pattinson was also a new parent, and he flew back to Los Angeles most weekends. In the book, the protagonist is distant from her child, bordering on abusive, but Lawrence and Pattinson found that they couldn’t abide that aspect of the story. In the movie, Grace and Jackson drink too many day beers and snipe at each other constantly, but they both love the baby.
“Maybe that was a mistake,” Lawrence said. “But, once Rob and I started doing our scenes together, I think it became more of a thing that a lot of postpartum women feel, where you’re not mad at your baby—you’re mad at your fucking husband, who can just go to the gym.” The script called for them to have a screaming match in the car with the baby in the back seat. “Rob and I were both, like, ‘We can’t.’ ” They had bonded with the twins who played their son—Lawrence held them a lot off camera, so that they would feel safe when she held them onscreen. (“Those babies,” Lawrence said, in a worshipful hush. “Victoria and Kennedy. The girls.”) Grace and Jackson had their fight alone, and Grace is never cruel to the child. “I think if there was a baby on my lap, I can’t hold her in a way that she’s not going to feel like I like her,” Lawrence said. “That would be so, so sad.”
Slightly to my dismay—I had never previously managed to secure a table at Via Carota—we weren’t eating. Lawrence was drinking water and vaping patiently. Her younger son was only six months old, and I could feel the invisible tether new mothers have to their infants: the rope tightening, the clock counting down. Later, she told me about the terrible postpartum anxiety she’d experienced with him. “I just thought every time he was sleeping he was dead,” she said. “I thought he cried because he didn’t like his life, or me, or his family. I thought I was doing everything wrong, and that I would ruin my children.” She took Zurzuvae, a recently developed drug, and it helped so quickly and significantly that she thinks all new moms should be briefed about it. She recounted a story about crying while asking ChatGPT a question about breastfeeding. “You’re doing the most amazing thing for your baby,” it had told her. “You’re such a loving mother.” That a robot would say that to her, she thought, called into question the sincerity of anyone else who did.
I found it interesting, I said, that she’d played self-sacrificial mothers and proto-mothers for a decade, and then, playing a mother for the first time after becoming one, she went for this character, who makes you worry that she’ll be too busy masturbating to notice the stroller drifting into the path of an oncoming car. Lawrence connected the choice to her own experience, and how it’s changed. She was acting full time by the age of fourteen, and spending long stretches away from her family. “I was parenting myself in a lot of ways. And I think that, if I were to look at it now, I could say I’ve successfully mothered myself to the point that now I can even be a bad mother” onscreen, she said. “Die My Love” appealed to her in part because it offered her the chance to inhabit a character who acted on every impulse. “You walk past someone’s car and notice the keys are in it, and you get the thought, What if I just hopped in it and drove off?” she told me. With Grace, she could play someone who would actually do that, and who would maybe never come back.
Lawrence was a double surprise to her parents: she was conceived accidentally, and she was the first girl born into her father’s family in fifty years. She has two brothers, five and ten years older than she is. They grew up in a nice suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, where her father owned a construction company and her mother ran a summer camp on a family property. Their milieu was conservative and Christian: purity pledges, fear of going to Hell. By adolescence, Lawrence could no longer accept the idea that anyone who didn’t believe in the Christian God would be damned for eternity, but religious baggage stayed with her for years. “There was a Switchfoot song, ‘Dare You to Move,’ that I’d listen to whenever I had sexual guilt,” she told me. “I was, like, That’ll clean me right up.”
Reading comments from Lawrence’s parents in her early press clippings, I got the sense that they hadn’t known what to do with her. “She had places in her mind to go,” her mother said, in 2010. “She never fit in anywhere.” Lawrence was restless and emotional and obsessed with TV; she liked reading but wasn’t great at school. I mentioned to her the idea that parents—our own, and now us—develop narratives about their kids, and that those narratives shape the way the kids are treated. Lawrence thought about her experience as a daughter. “What was the story? I guess that I loved attention,” she said. “And my takeaway was, kind of, I don’t know how much they really like me, as a person.”
At the age of nine, Lawrence was in a church play about the Book of Jonah and stole the show as a prostitute from the sinful Assyrian city of Nineveh. But it wasn’t until a spring-break trip to New York with her mother, when she was fourteen, that Lawrence became sure that she wanted to act. A scout snapped a Polaroid of her in Washington Square Park and invited her to meet with talent agencies that week. She read for a few commercials; when she got back home, she could think about nothing else. “I’d watch ‘Lizzie McGuire,’ and then I’d go and stand in front of the mirror and practice how I would do the lines,” she said. She returned to New York for the summer, chaperoned by her middle brother. She still remembers the dinner she had her first night back in the big city: honey-glazed boneless chicken wings from the Applebee’s in Times Square.
“We lived on Third Avenue and Twenty-third in this dilapidated, rat-infested place,” she recalled. “We would get plastic Solo cups from Duane Reade and try to make them last until they molded. I’d go on these go-sees, in these cattle calls with these beautiful, really well-dressed girls, and I’m in my TJ Maxx Kentucky clothes getting lost on the subway. I remember figuring out that, if I all of a sudden saw daylight, that meant I’d accidentally gone to Queens.”
She got some modelling and commercial work, then moved to Los Angeles, where life became more ad hoc. “There was always somebody with me—a teen-ager, my teen-age brother, my parents, whatever,” she said. “But there was a physical absence of a consistent parental figure.” Sometimes she would wear a collared shirt, a pleated skirt, and high socks and walk around Santa Monica, “because I just wanted random people on the street to assume I was in school.” She was lonely; she adopted odd accents when talking to strangers. “British, New Zealand,” she said, when I asked her which accents. “Can we cancel this profile?”
Lawrence auditioned for the roles of Bella Swan in “Twilight,” Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and Alice in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” (putting her prized British accent to use, without success). She was cast as the “big-chested girl” in an ill-fated TV pilot called “Not Another High School Show.” Her father was ready to intervene and call off the acting experiment—then she got a big part as the sassy teen-age daughter on “The Bill Engvall Show,” a TBS sitcom so ephemeral that watching clips on YouTube feels like entering an alternate reality. “It was perfect,” Lawrence said, of the show’s utter lack of cultural resonance, “because I didn’t get pigeonholed, and I had a steady paycheck, which meant I could actually choose my roles.” The one she wanted was Ree, the lead in “Winter’s Bone,” which was being adapted, by the director Debra Granik, from the novel by Daniel Woodrell. Lawrence’s mother had read the book and thought it was perfect for her daughter. But, after a second audition, Lawrence was told that she was too pretty. She flew to New York on a red-eye and auditioned, uninvited, a third time, makeupless and dishevelled. She got the part just as the sitcom was cancelled.
Her performance as Ree is precise and full of integrity. “She doesn’t care what you think of her,” Gary Ross, who wrote and directed the first “Hunger Games” movie, said. Jodie Foster, who directed Lawrence in “The Beaver,” the following year, told me, “She has a stillness that is really unusual, and an internal life that can’t help but come out through her face, with no broadness at all—a little magic trick that she may not be aware of.” Lawrence got her first Oscar nomination for the part, becoming, at the time, the second-youngest nominee ever for Best Actress.
Lawrence has had no formal acting training aside from after-school theatre classes in junior high—the last time she was in school of any kind. She considers getting an acting coach before most of her movies begin filming, she told me, but never goes through with it. There are limits to what she’s willing to endure for the art. “If it ever came down to the point where, to make a part better, I had to lose a little bit of my sanity, I wouldn’t do it,” she once said. “I would just do comedies.” She made an exception for “Mother!”; during one take, she hyperventilated so hard that she dislocated a rib. “That’s when I learned I was never going to do that again,” she told me. When filming “Die My Love,” she abided by her preferred ritual of watching dumb TV each night and temporarily forgetting that she has to act again the next day.
I could understand leaving a role behind after a day wraps. But what happened, I asked, when Lawrence walked to her mark? How did she transform from a person who FaceTimes her toddler and texts indelicate jokes to her friends into Grace, a character so feral and lonely that she claws her fingernails into bleeding stubs? “I don’t know,” Lawrence said. “It’s kind of a form of meditation. I get extremely focussed. I think it’s about whatever the truth is behind the line that one is saying.” She described “therapy sessions” with her directors, in which they deconstructed and analyzed her characters. “And then, when I go into this meditative state of being extremely focussed on what the character is saying, all that information finds its way to the right spot.”
Lawrence has a live-wire quality as an actor. In “American Hustle,” tears erupt from her eyes in a manner that calls to mind a four-year-old; her complexion genuinely flushes onscreen when her emotions rise. “She just becomes it, like a child actor,” Emma Stone, who has known Lawrence since they were both in their early twenties, told me. “The circumstance around you is real. Be in it. That’s what everybody wishes they could do.”
David O. Russell has a reputation for being hard on actors—several of them, including George Clooney and Amy Adams, have detailed his antagonistic behavior on set—but Lawrence credits him with teaching her how to act. Or, more properly, with freeing her to accept her own process. “If anyone calls me who’s doing a movie with him and asks for advice, I tell them, ‘You gotta be loose as fuck. You’re wet clay. Let him mold you.’ ” She auditioned for “Silver Linings Playbook” on Skype from her parents’ house in Kentucky. “She was real and she was herself and she was the character all at the same time,” Russell told me. “Then she killed a giant spider in the bathroom behind her during the same Skype and returned to spontaneously demonstrate exactly how the spider died with all its extended limbs frozen together.” When they made the movie, which co-starred Bradley Cooper, Jacki Weaver, and Robert De Niro, Lawrence found herself “working with actors who were very prepared, who knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t know,” she said. “It wasn’t until later, when I read an interview where David said, ‘That’s what she does—she stays loose like an athlete,’ that I was, like, ‘Oh, O.K. So that’s O.K. Nobody’s mad at me.’ ”
Lawrence also resembles an athlete in her capacity to exhibit a specific sort of genius and then slide into generalities when a reporter asks her to describe how she does it. The novel “Die, My Love” is a hyper-detailed tapestry of the unnamed narrator’s every passing thought, but Grace, in the film, never articulates what she thinks or feels—all the desire and fury in her mind have to be communicated physically. When I noted this, Lawrence said, “That’s so interesting. I never realized that.”
“It’s always mystified me,” Justine Ciarrocchi said, of her friend’s process. “It’s almost spiritual. Her fuel is empathy and abandon—if she’s too studied, she can’t drop in.” Foster also saw a crucial unknowing quality in Lawrence’s approach. “I frame it as somebody who has some great, almost ancestral emotional wounds, but who isn’t a hundred per cent clear intellectually about what they are,” she said. “She plays characters who aren’t necessarily aware of their triggers, the psychology underpinning everything. She gives this magical, mesmerizing, deep performance that comes from a place I’m not sure she understands.” Stone invoked a theatre adage: If an actor is onstage with a cat, who are you going to watch—the actor or the cat? “The audience would watch the cat,” Stone explained, “because it’s going to respond genuinely in the moment, while the actors are still acting. It’s that quality. Jen’s the cat.”
Lawrence is well out of her I-poop-my-pants era, but she remains steadfastly self-deprecating. “I don’t know why anyone likes me,” I heard her say to a different reporter. This seemed like a tactical response to the adulation that gets thrown at her—“Do you like taking compliments?” she asked me—as well as a basic feature of socialized womanhood. (“I have to stop myself from asking my husband multiple times a day if he’s mad at me,” she said.) It’s also a hangover from the period in her life when she still read the comments. (“There was one time, after I won the Oscar, that Justine and I couldn’t stop laughing—this was when we could still laugh about it—because someone just wrote, ‘She is a pig who should die.’ ”)
I pointed out to Lawrence how often she mentions not wanting to make anyone mad. “I feel like I am driven by anxiety,” she replied. “When I was a kid, I soothed my anxiety by trying to be good, trying to do the right thing, so that I wouldn’t upset God or my parents.” This shaped her into a person who wants to do right by others, she said; it was also one of the reasons that she made so many movies so quickly. “Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me,” she once told Vanity Fair. In 2018, she dropped her representation at Creative Artists Agency and took a break from acting. Soon afterward, she started her production company with Ciarrocchi. They called it Excellent Cadaver, after a Mafia term, cadaveri eccellenti, for a hit on a high-profile figure. “I think there was a part of me that just wanted to execute that part of me,” Lawrence has said, alluding to her hyper, embarrassing (her words!) celebrity avatar.
It was also around this time that Lawrence met her husband, Cooke Maroney, an art dealer. She had mentioned her interest in buying a painting to her friend Gene Stupnitsky, a former writer on “The Office” who later directed Lawrence in “No Hard Feelings.” He told her to ask Maroney about it. “I was, like, ‘What kind of name is this? What do I call him?’ ” Lawrence said. Then Maroney invited her to a gallery show. “I had no idea he was hot or single, and I was, like, ‘Whoa.’ ” Maroney’s father had been the head of American paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but had taken an interest in organic dairy farming and moved the family to Vermont, where Maroney grew up. Her husband’s art expertise seems to have rubbed off a bit on Lawrence, who made an offhand reference to the photographer William Eggleston to describe Ramsay’s approach to visual framing. “I’ve learned a lot through osmosis,” she told me, “because, if I ask him about his day, the story is about art.” Maroney is also six feet five, which is useful for Lawrence: when they’re out together, his height draws people’s eyes away from her.
While they were dating, Lawrence developed a different relationship to being a public figure. She couldn’t bring a bodyguard to the bar to meet his friends and still act as if things were normal. But she found that it was relatively easy to be a famous person in New York: here, she can go to workout classes without being accosted. “Nobody gives a shit,” she said. “I love this city.” (Nevertheless, stories circulate: a few years ago, I went to do karaoke at Sing Sing in the East Village, and a bartender told me that Lawrence had just been there the weekend before, with Adele. Lawrence confirmed this with a universal “remembering karaoke” grimace.)
Paparazzi regularly station themselves outside her town house downtown. Once she had kids, Lawrence decided to make herself an easy target. “It’s better than the cat-and-mouse thing where I’m going into garages and my eyes are darting around and I wonder if someone’s chasing me,” she said. “I realized that my kids would be aware of my energy, and that, if I was nervous and pissed when we left the house, they would feel that in their little bodies.” Now she goes out the front door, the paparazzi take pictures, and then they let her be for the rest of the day.
We were sitting at Happy Medium, a high-ceilinged art café near Chinatown where acrylic paints and small canvases had been laid out for us in an empty room. Lawrence had suggested that we paint portraits of each other for our second meetup—she had seen a couple do it on TikTok, as a date. I assured her that no whimsical activities were necessary for a story in a magazine that puts a diaeresis in the word “coöperate,” but she said that simply sitting and talking would be boring. She arrived with her assistant and no visible makeup; her publicist worked from her phone a few tables away. The whole activity was a bit conceptually distracting—slyly or otherwise, Lawrence had maneuvered me into producing a portrait of her in her presence. She groaned and giggled as we talked, occasionally muttering ominous words, such as “Voldemort” and “pug.” I suggested that this was an opportunity to channel her feelings about doing press into art, that she should feel free to do her worst. “You don’t look like this!” she yelped. Perhaps she was going to do something so weird that I would conclude—as she surely had, about fifteen years ago—that it was impossible to accurately convey what anyone was really like.
Because of the portrait, Lawrence’s expression, as we talked, swung back and forth between neutral and appalled. “It looks like your butt is your face and your legs are your hair,” she said. My own painting depicted a generic, pretty blonde, with a face less interesting than Lawrence’s. While I stared at it, I asked her about Botox and fillers. Even thirtysomethings these days are getting facelifts; not only celebrities but ordinary people with enough money and vanity sometimes appear mysteriously but distinctly “refreshed.” Lawrence didn’t want to get fillers, she said, because they show on camera. She gets Botox, but she has to be able to use her forehead and to play people who don’t have access to celebrity dermatology. Mostly joking, I asked if she’d had the seemingly ubiquitous new style of facelift done. “No,” she said. “But, believe me, I’m gonna!”
I had been thinking about a fully nude fight scene in “No Hard Feelings,” which Lawrence filmed after having a child. I was postpartum when I watched it, and seeing her boobs filled me with envy, anger, and reverence. Why was she getting a boob job? “Everything bounced back, pretty much, after the first one,” she said. “Second one, nothing bounced back.” She has to be nude on camera again in the spring, one year postpartum, she told me. Would she be getting them done if she weren’t a famous actress? “Maybe I wouldn’t be hustling to the appointment in the same way,” she said. “But I think yes.”
Lawrence described herself to me as a naturally political person. The first time she voted, in 2008, she voted for John McCain, but her politics shifted left soon afterward; she became impassioned, in our conversations, when talking about income inequality and reproductive rights. (In her early twenties, Lawrence got pregnant, and miscarried before a planned abortion.) In 2014, hundreds of private nude photos of female celebrities, including Lawrence, were leaked online. Lawrence’s statement about the breach helped mark an end to the cultural upskirting of the previous decade, when young women were blamed, by default, when others sought their exposure. “It is not a scandal,” she said at the time. “It is a sex crime. It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. Anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame.”
In the past few years, Lawrence has produced two documentaries with Excellent Cadaver, winning a Peabody for the first, “Bread & Roses,” which tracks the lives of women’s-rights activists in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in 2021. (Lawrence used her influence to help procure visas and relocate the women and their families.) The second, “Zurawski v Texas,” centers on a woman who was denied an abortion at eighteen weeks and subsequently went into septic shock, permanently damaging her reproductive system.
Lawrence now wants to write and direct, starting with a comedy. She has a project in mind, a feature she developed with Kim Caramele, a producer and writer whom Lawrence met through Caramele’s sister, Amy Schumer. The two are currently working on a second draft of the script.
I stepped out to use the bathroom and returned to find Lawrence laughing. “I texted Cooke a picture of my painting,” she told me, “and he said, ‘Are you being interviewed by a dog?’ ” She had been aiming for something like Pocahontas in the style of the contemporary American painter Elizabeth Peyton, she explained. I looked like a decapitated pug.
In May, at the Cannes Film Festival, MUBI acquired “Die My Love” for twenty-four million dollars. MUBI has built a catalogue of acclaimed indies (“The Substance,” “Decision to Leave”), but it had never paid so much for a film, nor had any of its previous titles boasted the star power of actors such as Lawrence and Pattinson. There will be a full Oscar campaign. At the end of September, Lawrence flew to Spain for the San Sebastián International Film Festival, which would host a screening and give her the Donostia Award for lifetime achievement. She is the youngest person to receive the honor.
I landed in San Sebastián at about the same time Lawrence did, midmorning on a Thursday, when it was 2 A.M. in New York. A few hours later, I exited the hotel where she was staying. A small crowd had been waiting to catch a glimpse of her; they would be there, more or less, the entire weekend. Lawrence walked around metal barriers, signing autographs and smiling for selfies. Everywhere she went, people shouted her name. Black cars took her and her entourage—a stylist, an assistant, a publicist, hair and makeup people—to a photo call. She passed more pleading fans as she walked up a long concrete ramp to the Kursaal, a convention center designed by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, where the festival’s main events were held.
She was getting touch-ups in the greenroom when Ciarrocchi rushed in wearing a minidress and tall boots, worried that her legs weren’t gleaming. The two had to do a press conference together. They were roommates in Los Angeles for years and have a sisterly rapport. They braid each other’s hair when one of them is in crisis; they went for a 5 A.M. walk when Lawrence was in early labor, holding hands and looking at the moon. Lawrence squatted down to rub lotion on her friend’s legs. Ciarrocchi looked at her and said, “Who’s the talent now, bitch?”
In a small auditorium, questions in Spanish were simultaneously translated to earpieces. The festival, like many other recent cultural gatherings, was charged with a palpable tension about Gaza—just days before, three thousand pro-Palestine marchers had blocked the bridge leading to the Kursaal. MUBI had been criticized for accepting a hundred-million-dollar investment from Sequoia Capital, which is also the lead investor in the Israeli defense-tech startup Kela, a company founded in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7th. MUBI’s C.E.O. insisted that this did not make the company complicit in “the events occurring in Gaza,” and said that MUBI will create a fund for artists working in conflict zones or experiencing displacement.
A reporter began to ask a question on the topic when a moderator cut in. “We expressly indicated that this is not possible,” she said, and called on another reporter. Minutes earlier, Lawrence had spoken about freedom of expression being at risk in the United States. The next reporter noted that Lawrence was a mother, and presumably worried about the future. “You are just an actress in a festival, but outside here, just the other day, there was people protesting about the situation in Palestine,” he said. “Kids are dying.” The moderator tried to interrupt again, but Lawrence looked at the reporter, encouraging him to continue.
Lawrence told me afterward that she had noticed the reporter in the crowd earlier. “I could see something in his eyes—he was scared,” she said. “I felt that there was something he didn’t want to say, but had to.” She had prepared an answer for a question about Palestine, but she ended up being more frank than she’d planned. “I’m terrified,” she told the reporter. “It’s mortifying. What’s happening is no less than a genocide, and it’s unacceptable. I’m terrified for my children, for all of our children.” She said she wished that anything she said or did could fix things. “I just want people to stay focussed on who is responsible and the things they can do,” she added. Lawrence is appropriately skeptical about the utility of celebrities speaking about politics: she has endorsed politicians and seen how little it can move the needle; the performative and often hypocritical liberalism one sometimes encounters in Hollywood has, if anything, helped push the country to the right (including, semi-secretly, plenty of celebrities). But Gaza may be an exception to the fruitlessness of celebrity opinion, given how wary many people are to speak candidly about it in public. By the next day, Lawrence’s words had made dozens of headlines.
A few hours later, she and Ciarrocchi were in Lawrence’s suite, getting dressed for the screening. “Take that jacket off, you look like a waiter,” Lawrence yelled at Ciarrocchi, who was wearing a white button-down over a sheer black turtleneck. Ciarrocchi took the button-down off, tentatively. “Yes!” Lawrence said. “You have the tiniest fucking waist!” Lawrence was in an asymmetrical wool dress, open at the back, with a draped cutout on one side and the other cinched with a black leather belt. She rehearsed her acceptance speech for the award in the car, anxiously asking the driver how to pronounce Basque words. She had to remember not to lift her right arm, lest her boob instantly be exposed.
The Kursaal is designed as a pair of prisms, with translucent glass over gridded metal rising diagonally from the harbor. Exiting the vehicle felt like entering virtual reality: a floor of red carpet, a ceiling of white spotlights, a medieval throng of shrieking people arranged in endless outstretched walls. It was the campaign trail; it was the Hunger Games. The wattage of Lawrence’s fame is startling to witness in person—she is a Julia Roberts-level star in a generation that has vanishingly few of them, a millennial A-lister who is not on social media and hasn’t done TV since “The Bill Engvall Show.” She made the lap smoothly, her smile caught by a dozen phone screens each half second. In the greenroom, she sat down and poured herself a large glass of white wine.
We moved to the auditorium, where a greatest-hits compilation of her film roles was played. She accepted the award, and then we were seated for the screening. The title card for “Die My Love” appears over a forest fire while heavy metal blasts. Ramsay’s cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, shot much of the movie on Ektachrome, getting what he called a “magnificent distortion of reality.” Night scenes were shot during the day, with the film manually darkened; everything looks woozy, hyperreal. The sound design is itchy and buzzing. Ramsay described the movie’s aspect ratio as “portrait format,” and said she chose it because of the way that Lawrence’s image holds the camera: “I just felt like she was carrying the whole thing.”
The scenes in the book that Lawrence had responded to most strongly are between the protagonist and her mother-in-law, who tries to help but can’t. In the film, that role is played by Sissy Spacek, who gives the part an arresting gentleness; her arm, raised to support Grace, is like a bridge that’s already breaking. Grace often wears thin, billowing dresses—pregnancy clothes—and you can see, in some shots, a slight outline of Lawrence’s second-trimester bump.
The theatre gasped when Grace broke a mirror with her forehead. I thought of what Lawrence had told me she found most pleasurable about acting. “Even if I’m doing a really, really intense scene, if I’m very angry or very sad, it’s still an adrenaline rush,” she said. “And, when I wake up after a cut, none of it is actually happening to me, so I get to have the adrenaline, and the rush, without any of the consequences.”
“You get to double your life,” I said.
“Or cut it in half,” she replied.
There was a standing ovation, and Lawrence was hurried out into a small black-walled room. Her publicist told her quietly how to navigate the last screaming crowd of the night: walk alone down the stairs of the building, stop on the white mark, then continue to her car. “Do you need a moment?” a festival handler asked. “Are you scared?” Lawrence, surprised by the question, said no. ♦
