Jennifer Lawrence rose to main prominence at simply 20 years previous when she was forged because the lead character, Katniss Everdeen, within the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s 2008 e book, The Hunger Games.
The first film opened in 2012 to very large success, and Jen reprised the function in three subsequent movies launched in 2013, 2014, and 2015.
Now, greater than a decade after she starred within the first film, Jennifer is reflecting on the challenges that got here with fronting such a beloved franchise.
Sitting down with Viola Davis for Variety’s Actors on Actors collection, the now 32-year-old mirrored on the pressures that got here with scoring the coveted function.
“The Hunger Games was an awesome responsibility,” she started. “I mean, those books were huge, and I knew that the audience was children. And there were so many different opinions on what is this action figure for children going to look like.”
With such a deal with how Katniss would look on display, Jennifer recalled discussions about her physique, and whether or not it might be obligatory for her to reduce weight as a way to play a personality who had grown up preventing hunger.
“The biggest conversation, of course — this was pre-MeToo, and I’m a woman — so it was weight. And you know, ‘How much weight are you gonna lose?’ and ‘Well, it’s called The Hunger Games, you wouldn’t be’— you know,” she stated, implying that her character wanted to be smaller.
But, regardless of going through stress from executives to reduce weight, Jennifer emphasised that weight-reduction plan merely wasn’t one thing she was keen to do — if not for her sake, then for the good thing about her younger fanbase.
“Along with me being young and growing and not able to be on a diet, because, you know, who wants to be on a diet? I was also like, I don’t know if I want all of the girls who are going to dress up as Katniss to feel like they can’t because they’re not a certain weight,” she stated. “And I can’t let that seep into my brain either.”
Interestingly, this isn’t the primary time Jen has spoken candidly about physique picture in Hollywood.
In late 2013, whereas selling the second Hunger Games film, Catching Fire, the actor defined why it was so necessary for her to push again towards the societal glorification of thinness.
“We have the ability to control this image that young girls are going to be seeing [in The Hunger Games],” she informed the BBC on the time. “Girls see enough of this body that they will never be able to obtain, these unrealistic expectations. It’s an amazing opportunity to rid ourselves of that in this industry.”
And sadly, as her profession has progressed it appears that evidently Jennifer, like a lot of her friends throughout numerous industries, has continued to be met with poisonous physique picture requirements.
During a 2017 look on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, Jennifer revealed that whereas engaged on a film she selected to not title, a lady government instructed that she lose a major quantity of weight throughout the house of two weeks, telling her it was obligatory that she be “skinny-skinny” for the undertaking.
The government even instructed that they make use of somebody to stay in her house and monitor her consuming habits, with Jen describing the complete expertise as “bullshit.”
Of course, she declined to go forward with the unhealthy scheme and seemingly reported the options, saying within the interview: “I took care of everything personally on my own — and trust me, they were handled.”