“Oh my gosh,” she says, in her rich, dewy Kentucky accent, and holds out a perfectly manicured hand. “It’s really good to meet you.” She sits back in her chair, the youthful epitome of good health, good genes and good luck, and only in the slight set of her jaw is there a hint of the dutiful actor at work.
It’s that steeliness that has finally secured Lawrence the serious attention – and accompanying Oscar buzz – she has sought since she was a determined 14-year-old. She has the fresh, casual beauty and blooming sexuality required for the corrupted-cheerleader look much favoured by Hollywood franchises, but has set herself apart from the likes of Megan Fox and Ashley Greene by failing to exploit them; her role in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone – as Ree Dolly, the resolute big sister left to tend to her catatonic mother and young siblings after the disappearance of her meth-dealing father – studiously eschews glamour.
Set in the Ozark mountains in Missouri, where a vast, ice-white sky stretches for miles over a wasteland of barbed wire, burnt-out cars and strip-lit barns, and life is soundtracked by a loop of barking dogs and distant gunshots, Winter’s Bone presents as forlorn an atmosphere as any you’ll experience in cinemas this year. But Lawrence’s still, graceful performance as the preternaturally strong-willed teenager doggedly juggling the multiple roles she has been forced into – her siblings’ mother, her mother’s carer, her father’s replacement – is so intriguing and emotionally compelling that you’re likely to emerge feeling unexpectedly warmed up.
“I’d have walked on hot coals to get the part,” says Lawrence. “I thought it was the best female role I’d read – ever. I was so impressed by Ree’s tenacity and that she didn’t take no for an answer. For the audition, I had to fly on the redeye to New York and be as ugly as possible. I didn’t wash my hair for a week, I had no makeup on. I looked beat up in there. I think I had icicles hanging from my eyebrows.”
Lawrence employs military language when she talks about her mission to impress Granik, and admits that since high school, she has been almost pathologically focused on her career. While her friends were hanging around street corners mooning over Justin Timberlake and wondering if they’d get away with forgetting their maths homework, 14-year-old Lawrence was harassing her mother into taking her to New York to audition for a part in a script she’d got hold of.
She isn’t sentimental about her ambitious younger self – “I was a stubborn little shit” – but you suspect that though she pretends to consider her naive refusal to countenance failure “totally stupid”, she is proud of her intense sense of purpose. It is, after all, what attracted her to Winter’s Bone.
“When I first got to New York, my feet hit the sidewalk and you’d have thought I was born and raised there,” she says. “I took over that town. None of my friends took me seriously. I came home and announced, ‘I’m going to move to New York,’ and they were like ‘OK.’ Then when I did, they kept waiting for me to fail and come back. But I knew I wouldn’t. I was like, ‘I’ll show you.’”
She didn’t get that first part – “I totally sucked at first” – but she did get herself an agent, and, as far as Lawrence was concerned, that was the cue for a seismic life-change. She persuaded her parents to have her taken out of school and set her sights on her first movie role.
After attracting acclaim for her sure-footed debut as a troubled, thrill-seeking teenager in Guillermo Arriaga’s Burning Plain in 2008, she shone in the gritty The Poker House, as another smart, determined kid with the weight of her dependent family – in this case, her prostitute mother and two younger sisters – threatening to kill off any chances of a normal, hope-spangled life.
Lawrence cites Charlize Theron, whom she played opposite in The Burning Plain, as an early acting hero, and Theron’s portrayal of serial-killing prostitute Aileen Wuornos in Monster as one of her favourite performances. It seems likely that she has been influenced not only by Theron’s choice of roles and but also by her determination not to allow her obvious allure to undermine her reputation. Lawrence is already putting together a strong set of opinions about Hollywood’s attitude to young female actors, her face screwing up with contempt when she considers the kind of roles she’s been offered in the last couple of years.
“I just don’t like that you can either be ugly and smart or pretty and dumb, or ugly and nice or pretty and mean,” she says scornfully. “It’s in every studio film you see. There’s not a lot of imagination out there. Nobody outside of indie films steps outside the box. That drives me nuts.” It’s bold talk, but so far, Lawrence’s choice of roles has justified her chutzpah; her next project, Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, is a “weird as hell film” (Lawrence’s words) with Mel Gibson as a depressed man who communicates through his beaver hand-puppet.
If she sounds like a cliche – another cocksure, ambition-driven engine who was “born to act” bravely battling the hazards of her youthful comeliness – Lawrence is enough of a surprise package to keep her interesting and likable. Just as Ree Dolly is at her most beguiling when her mask momentarily slips, and her face briefly twinges with trauma and adolescent uncertainty, the usually formidable Lawrence’s childish vulnerability is her most affecting quality. “Being away from home is my least favourite part of all of this,” she says. “That really is the hardest part of my job. I really get so homesick. I always get so scared before I go and film a movie because I know I’m going to get homesick.” Winter’s Bone was the first film on which Lawrence wasn’t accompanied by her mother – she turned 18 just before production. “I hadn’t felt like I’d needed her before but when she wasn’t there, I ended up phoning her crying and asked her to come. And she and my dad came to me. I was getting sick, and I was just so tired, so I just called my mommy, crying, and asked her to come. She loved that, of course.”
Another unlikely item on the Lawrence CV is a photo and video shoot for Esquire magazine earlier this year, in which she threw herself into the kind of role she has firmly refused to offer Hollywood thus far, frolicking (the only word for it) in a bikini in classic sex-kitten mode. When asked about it, she shrugs in a manner that suggests she is part defensive and part sick of the subject. She’s said in the past that she did it to avoid being typecast after a succession of dowdy roles, which makes some kind of sense. Today though, she is more clear-cut. The point, she implies, is that she gets the industry for what it is. We won’t be reading about Jennifer Lawrence’s quarter-life crisis any time soon.
“There are two sides of this job,” she says, her jaw setting again. “There’s the artistic side, which is acting in the movie. But there’s also the business side. And I understood that the shoot was a good business decision. I had many people that I completely trust – agents, publicists – and they said it was a good idea. And I agreed. I understood why it had to happen. I’m sure I’ve been criticised for doing it but you know what? I don’t care.”
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Hunger Games
House at the End of the Street
X-Men: First Class
Like Crazy
The Beaver
Winter's Bone
