The Fire burns the Rose

JENNIFER LAWRENCE ON VOGUE

Jennifer Lawrence graces the cover of Vogue magazine for September 2013. Aside from the photo on the cover, the issue also features a full profile and a series of photos. 

Here are some highlights from the interview:

On being Katniss Everdeen

One of the oddities of Jennifer Lawrence’s life right now is that the character that she is most closely associated with— Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games—is on a trajectory that is, in many ways, similar to Lawrence’s own. “When Winter’s Bone was getting nominated,” says Lawrence, “I had only done indies, and suddenly I was introduced to this brand-new world where I didn’t feel like myself. I was in these weird gowns and listening to people talk about things I didn’t understand. And I remember reading that in the book and being like, Oh, my God, I know exactly what this feels like. I don’t know what it’s like to get ready for your death, but I do know what it’s like to be almost a puppet. And then when I was making the second film, I had become more acquainted with that world, and I think that’s something that Katniss experiences. She is different when she comes back. She does feel more comfortable in the Capitol; she understands the people more, and it’s not as eerie and scary and unfamiliar. She kind of knows how to work the system.”

Her humor:

Her Hunger Gamescostar Woody Harrelson says she creates an atmosphere on set of constant game-playing. “She is one-of-a-kind, man. She is so herself. I love how she doesn’t censor herself. She says the most outrageous shit. Just incredible, the stuff she’ll say.”

As Russell says, “She grew up with these two older brothers, so she will do an off-color joke that will shock you and make you laugh so hard. And then she just moves on.” Jodie Foster, who directed her in The Beavera few years ago, agrees: “It’s one of the things that I love about her the most—her rapid-fire teenage-boy-humor brain.”

On her family and growing up

Her parents, Karen and Gary, raised her and her older brothers, Blaine and Ben, in Louisville. Were they funny? “My mom is big funny,” she says. “She’s loud funny. And my dad is the opposite—the funniest person you will ever meet, but he never raises his voice. He’s just really quick. Very subtle.” She pauses. “We definitely grew up funny.” Another pause. “You have to be funny in our family, to survive, because we are so mean to each other.”

 “Look,” she says. “I grew up in Kentucky, I have brothers, we had to do sports, I was a horrible student, and I kept getting grounded every time my report card came out. Acting was never an option. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, well, you got a C in math; you’re grounded. But you can be an actor!’ ”

“I was a weirdo,” she says. “I wasn’t picked on or anything. And I wasn’t smarter than the other kids; that’s not why I didn’t fit in. I’ve always just had this weird anxiety. I hated recess. I didn’t like field trips. Parties really stressed me out. And,” she adds, “I had a very different sense of humor.” I ask Lawrence how that manifested itself in, say, junior high. She launches into several tales as examples. Like the time she decided it would be funny to jump out of the emergency exit of a moving school bus; or the time she thought it would be really funny to announce to the entire seventh grade that she wet the bed; or this: “My family went on a cruise, and I got a terrible haircut. FYI: Never get your hair cut on a cruise. And I had, like, this blonde curly ‘fro, and I walked into the gym the first day back in seventh grade and everyone was staring at me, and for some reason I thought, I know what I need to do! And I just started sprinting from one end of the gym to the other, and I thought it was hilarious. But nobody else at that age really did. It was genuinely weird.”

Her talent

“She has such a pure talent,” says Foster, who cast her in The Beaver based on a few minutes of footage she saw of Winter’s Bone in the editing room. “She has this really quiet talent that in the beginning I don’t think she even understood she had.”

“Whatever it was that happened to her when she was young, when she figured things out,” says Russell, “she transmuted all that energy into the soul and the freedom that she puts into acting.” During the filming of Catching Fire, Francis Lawrence was “blown away by the seemingly small amount of work that goes into a performance and how instinctive everything is,” he says. “It’s all spontaneous; it all comes out of her gut, in the moment. I’ve never seen anything like it.”