Jennifer Lawrence Says She No Longer Has The 'Fear and Insecurity' That Led Her to Avoid Risky Roles
Jennifer Lawrence says she's now unafraid of taking on riskier roles like her portrayal of a sexy Russian spy in Red Sparrow.
The 27-year-old actress spoke to ET's Carly Steel from her home in Holland to promote Red Sparrow, a film in which Lawrence bares it all during a nightmare sequence that has her fully nude in front of a classroom full of people.
"I don't have the same fear and insecurity in that one specific area that I used to," she told ET on Skype this morning. "So you know I'm always gonna take on roles for the same reason, you know, the character speaks to me and the director and the story. But I'm no longer gonna let that be a factor in my decision making."
She touched more explicitly on her nude scene with Steel earlier where she said the hardest part of portraying the Russian spy wasn't the nudity, but the accent. The nudity she found herself oddly comfortable with, despite past jitters involving intimate scenes.
"Everybody made me feel so comfortable that I probably at a certain point started making everybody else uncomfortable," she told ET. "Because I'd be like, 'I don't want the robe. I'm hot. I'm eating.' Everybody's like, 'She needs to cover up.'"
Jennifer credits the aid of her husband, actor Michiel Huisman and her director Francis Lawrence, who also directed Lawrence in three of the Hunger Games films.
"You know, I met my husband as I was coming off of filming this movie and it was a sort of ethereal experience. Michiel is fiercely intelligent and gentle, and, you know, we share this huge passion in our life which is film making and story telling and he sort of helped me fill in the pieces where I still felt insecure and almost disenfranchised post-filming. You get comfortable with your crew and cast and that's fine, then suddenly you remember it doesn't end there. That's where Michiel came in, he taught me not just to feel empowered but be empowered, too."
As for her Director, "I trust her. I think she definitely trusts me," Lawrence told ET on the red carpet. "I'd like to think that it would be harder for her to say yes to a movie like this with somebody else, with somebody who's a stranger. It certainly made it easier to communicate about some of the content within the movie because we knew each other so well but that was definitely a positive thing."
Co-star Joel Edgerton praised Lawrence's poise and hard work at the premiere, telling ET that the actress handled the "raw emotional" role well.
"Normally I'm an incredibly competitive person and I'd like to think that I work harder then anybody else, but I have to admit it's not true in this case," he conceded.