I woke up hungover recently and felt that death was nigh, until I opened TikTok and discovered that Jennifer Lawrence had begun her most recent press tour.
Suddenly, my headache disappeared and the sun seemed to shine just a little brighter, because I knew — based on her press tours of yore — that a collection of chaotic and effortlessly soundbite-able junket interviews was about to overrun our feeds.
No one has mastered the art of a press tour like Jennifer Lawrence. It was a craft she first began honing in 2012 while promoting her lead role in a little film called The Hunger Games.
On-screen, she portrayed a… let’s face it, rather dull and monotone character (I’m a bonafide Mockingjay, don’t come for me!) who was enviably caught in a love triangle between Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson.
But off-screen, in interviews and on red carpets, Lawrence quickly became one of Hollywood’s most endearing stars, capturing the hearts of everyone with her self-deprecating humour and refreshing candidness. The fact she is also a terrific actress was the cherry on top.
It was the Hunger Games press tour that birthed Lawrence’s “Where’s the pizza?!” moment, which still sits atop every GIF keyboard and was spoofed by Ariana Grande on Saturday Night Live.
Compilation videos assembling her funniest junket moments racked up millions of views on Youtube, right before Lawrence again ran the press gauntlet for Silver Linings Playbook.
Her schtick as a relatable, charming and un-media trained icon reached its peak when she tripped on en route to collecting her Best Actress trophy for that film at the 2013 Oscars.
Lawrence’s subsequent, expletive-filled interview, and her falling over again at the next year’s Oscars, only sealed the deal of her persona as a brash and irreverent star, far from the demureness of her Oscar-winning peers like Natalie Portman or Anne Hathaway.
What followed was an unprecedented run in which Lawrence’s long string of high-profile roles — from American Hustle to X-Men, Red Sparrow, Passengers and Mother! — saw her blasted across headlines and news feeds for what felt like years at time.
She got tipsy on Ellen DeGeneres’ show and introduced us to her drunk alter-ego Gail. She told Seth Meyers she wanted to ask him out before realising he was married. On Jimmy Fallon, she recalled mistaking someone for Elizabeth Taylor at a party despite Taylor dying years prior.
Lawrence was anywhere and everywhere to the point of oversaturation, which as we’ve unfortunately come to learn with female celebrities, was a recipe for inevitable backlash.
In Hollywood, what goes up must come down, and years of overexposure saw fans turn on Lawrence like clockwork. What was once her most endearing qualities were quickly dubbed fake by fans.
In 2018, Lawrence took a hiatus from acting in large part because she feared “everybody had gotten sick of me”.
“I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right,” Lawrence told Vanity Fair in 2021.
That is the sentiment Lawrence has carried to all press tours post-hiatus. Save for a few meme-ready moments while promoting No Hard Feelings — including *that* hilarious Hot Ones interview — the actress is noticeably more reserved, which is intentional on her part.
“Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again.’ I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie,” Lawrence, now on a press tour for Die, My Love, said in a New Yorker profile published last week.
“I look at those [old] interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying,” she added.
It’s upsetting that Lawrence seems to still shoulder blame for the backlash when history has shown us with countless other celebrities that Hollywood simply loves to build women up only to tear them back down.
And for Lawrence, the supposed source of the backlash — that she’s too brash, too much — feels like unnecessary grounds for her to now be terrified of press tours.
It’s such a shame, since Lawrence’s junkets were a highlight of 2010s pop culture, and the only thing she could be accused of was having a blast in the limelight and making us laugh along the way.
Whether Lawrence will ever reclaim the narrative around her persona remains to be seen, but at least those compilation videos will live on in perpetuity. And for that, I’m as grateful as Lawrence is for a well-earned slice of pizza.
Lead images: Getty Images and X
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