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Celeb News: Jennifer Lawrence covers Vogue's September Issue
Member Since: 9/3/2011
Posts: 22,014
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This is days old and AP but alright.
An amazing cover.
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Member Since: 8/12/2012
Posts: 13,665
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side 5 - 7
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Russell also thinks that this, too, shall pass. “She loves living and having her freedom. I’m sure she’ll find a way to keep doing that.” Jodie Foster, who knows a thing or two about having your life upended by other people’s obsessions, says this: “It wasn’t the same when I was young. I never hired a bodyguard in my life. But certainly, there’s a way to live your life—your real life, the life you live after 5:00 p.m.—and it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s a temporary thing. She’s grounded and solid, with great parents and all that; they will remind her of who she is. I think she has the God-given genetic ability to be well adjusted.”
When I tell Lawrence that it’s been a while since I’ve profiled an actress, she looks at me. “Oh, no,” she says. “You’re rusty?” I can’t help wondering where the funny comes from. 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.”
Although she jokes about it (“I think all mothers are a nightmare—I don’t think you can have children and not lose your goddamn mind”), she is close to her parents. Her mother owns a summer camp (Blaine runs it now), and her father was in construction. (Ben designs Web sites.) The story of how their daughter was discovered—photographed in Union Square in New York City by a model scout when she was visiting the city on spring break at the age of fourteen—has been written about so much that, even though she’s only 23, it has already ossified into myth. Could it be true? Had someone so obviously gifted never really thought about acting? “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!’ ”
All throughout our lunch at Odeon, the part of Lawrence that never let up was a kind of intense engagement with the world or the person in front of her. You could practically see her brain scanning the room, sifting through the data, and then spitting out something dryly observed, perfectly timed, or oddly profound. (At one point she picked up my RadioShack tape recorder and examined it: “This thing is archaic. Are you going to write this whole thing out longhand, with, like, a pen?”) If there is a downside—and I didn’t experience it as such—it might be that she’s so busy connecting and processing that it overwhelms her. There were many moments when she was so excited to share the seven things that just popped into her head that it would render her breathless and momentarily incomprehensible. As Jodie Foster says about directing her, “It’s hard for her to be superficial, to be girly and silly and unaware. And so my direction was often stupid things, like ‘Move your hands a lot’ or ‘Giggle,’ just trying to loosen her up so she wasn’t as aware of her own significance.”
Given her intensity, it does not come as a surprise that Lawrence describes her childhood as an “unhappy” one—exceptional, excitable, hot-wired kids are often misunderstood and full of anxiety. Lawrence herself was so anxious that her parents found her a therapist. “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.”
David O. Russell mentions a story that Lawrence told him about how when she was ten years old, she would ring her own doorbell and then pretend to be someone else when her family answered: “Hi, my name is Susan. My car broke down up the street, and I’m wondering if I could come in and use your phone.” Given all of this, it’s hard to believe that Lawrence—or her parents—didn’t have some inkling she was destined for show business. “I’ve never said this before,” she says, “because there is no way to say it without it being completely misunderstood, but ever since I was really little, I always had a very normal idea of what I wanted: I was going to be a mom and I was going to be a doctor and I was going to live in Kentucky. But I always knew”—here she lowers her voice—“that I was going to be famous. I honest to God don’t know how else to describe it. I used to lie in bed and wonder, Am I going to be a local TV person? Am I going to a motivational speaker? It wasn’t a vision. But as it’s kind of happening, you have this buried understanding: Of course.”
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Member Since: 8/12/2012
Posts: 13,665
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side 6 - 7
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Lawrence left school when she was fifteen to pursue acting in earnest, and by 2006, she was living in a condo in Santa Monica with her mother. She quickly got cast in the TBS comedy The Bill Engvall Show, which lasted only three seasons. “I know it sounds so stupid,” says Lawrence, “but it was kind of like I finally found something people were telling me I was good at, which I had never heard, ever. And that was a big reason why my parents let me do this. One time, my mom was on the phone with my dad, saying, ‘We’re paying for therapy and all this medication, and we don’t need it when she’s here. She’s happy.’ ”
Lawrence made a series of independent films, including Guillermo Arriaga’s directorial debut, The Burning Plain, with Charlize Theron. And then, just before she turned nineteen, she shot Winter’s Bone, the deeply affecting low-budget film about a family of crystal-meth addicts in the Ozarks, directed by Debra Granik—and got her first Oscar nomination. “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.”
Russell was constantly taken aback by her seeming nonchalance. “I remember Bradley Cooper and I saying, ‘Is this kid even paying attention?’ Because she’s goofing around or eating my potato chips or making fart jokes. And then all of a sudden, she comes in, and bam! She’s like a lot of great athletes. You see that they stay loose, and that’s how they can be so in-the-moment while under enormous amounts of pressure. If there’s two minutes left in the game, they can come in and do something extraordinary because their jaw is not getting clenched. Jen stays loose. And then she hits a three-point shot from some ridiculous distance and we all just look at each other and go, ‘Wow.’ ”
After four hours at the Odeon, we gather our things (“Don’t forget your nineties car phone,” she says) and then head outside. We pile into the SUV and immediately get caught in a bumper-to-bumper snarl (“There’s too much traffic,” she says to the driver. “You’re fired”). We are heading back to the Greenwich Hotel (owned by Lawrence’s pal De Niro, whom she bumped into last night), where she is staying for the weekend, in a huge suite on the sixth floor. We stand at the big windows as a summer thunderstorm rolls through and drenches all the hapless people on the street below. “Right now I’m just a big fan of windows,” she says. “I stand at my window at my hotel in Montreal. Like it will be hours. It’s the only time I can look at big groups of people, and they’re not looking at me.”
Suddenly, her assistant and best friend of four years, Justine, walks in. She’s just come back from having lunch with an ex-boyfriend, and they parse the meaning of every exchange. Then Lawrence gives her friend the once-over and says, “P.S. Perfect outfit. And your butt looks great in that skirt.” They met four years ago, shortly after the Winter’s Bone shoot, in Los Angeles, and it was love at first sight. Back at Odeon, when I was asking Lawrence how she stays sane while working so much, she said, “Justine is with me. So it’s kind of like, this consistent thing in my life. I’m still doing what a 23-year-old should be doing, which is hanging out with my friend and being normal. I still have to put the dishes away. And I still have to listen. When you’ve been doing press for a very long time, you talk about yourself constantly. My biggest fear is that I’m going to take that into the real world.”
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Member Since: 8/12/2012
Posts: 13,665
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side 7 - 7
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Justine says, “What did you guys talk about for four hours?” I mention that one of the things we discussed is how odd it is that the press makes such a big deal over how “refreshingly unfiltered” her friend is, just because she has opinions and is funny.
“I just think when you’re famous, everything is exaggerated,” Justine says. “It’s because she’s honest. It sounds a little cheesy, but she has a real person’s body, she cusses and says the wrong things on television, and she’s just herself. Literally everyone else is playing the game, but she is not. And I don’t think she’s capable of playing it, frankly.” She goes on, “The number-one question I’m asked is ‘Has she changed?’ And I get such pleasure in being able to say, ‘No. If anything, she’s gotten more grounded, more normal.’ ”
It’s perhaps no accident that the actor Lawrence gets most “starstruck” by is her X-Men costar James McAvoy, “because he knows what’s important: He has a wife, he has a baby, and he has a calm peacefulness about him that comes from just knowing that this is what life is about.” Lawrence appears determined to keep a sense of herself, too, despite the craziness of Hollywood, where people regularly tell her she should date somebody “on her level.” “Like, what is that level?” she asks. “That doesn’t mean anything to me, as a person.”
Lawrence seems very aware that she’s a girl from Kentucky with uncanny talent who happens to be riding a huge wave. At one point back at Odeon, I asked her if she was enjoying Montreal. “A little bit. I mean . . . uh . . . yeah? Yes and no. It’s just that I’m still getting used to everything. It still makes me a little emotional, just to see how quickly everything kind of changes . . . that it changes so fast. So I’ve kind of been a big homebody lately. But I think eventually, one of these days, I guess when the next franchise starts and I’m not in it, and the new Jennifer Lawrence is born, then I’ll be able to go outside.”
In the meantime, she has no plans to slow down anytime soon. One of the projects she’s most excited about, she says, is producing the film version of Jeannette Walls’s blockbuster memoir The Glass Castle. When I mention that I’ve always thought of Walls as an old-fashioned forties throwback, with her coiffed red hair and big, toothy smile, she says, “Yes, those are the things I’m trying to take out of the movie.” I ask her to explain, and it turns out that Lawrence is going to bring some of her own true-grit authenticity to the part. “Jeannette wanted to fit in a polished world, so she’d shower all the time because she never felt clean,” Lawrence says. “I find that, to watch somebody for two hours, you want her to have a little dirt on her, to be a little tacky, you know? I feel like you like those people more.”
Jodie Foster, the original lovable kid with the dirt under her fingernails who moved effortlessly between seventies art-house cinema and studio blockbusters—not to mention practically wrote the book on how to be both dangerously famous and stubbornly private—understands those kinds of dichotomies: “Like me, she’s not afraid of her serious side. But she’s also fun and full of life, and in a way, that’s the part that’s going to save her. That she has both sides. She can see the tragic and the comic side of her life.”
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Member Since: 3/14/2013
Posts: 30,547
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She's beautiful but the cover is a little bit boring for me.
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Member Since: 5/10/2012
Posts: 10,996
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Would have expected a cover that matches the caliber of Vogue. Instead, it's rather underwhelming.
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Member Since: 3/28/2008
Posts: 11,952
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Everything about her is so boring!
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Member Since: 6/29/2012
Posts: 13,597
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That was a good read. Thanks for posting that rbautz 
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Member Since: 2/18/2007
Posts: 12,501
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natural
gorgeous
pretty
whatever
but t\for The September Issue standard
is so boring especially for Vogue
it would be perfect for Allure or Glamour type of cover
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Member Since: 8/10/2010
Posts: 14,634
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Originally posted by uhoh-ohno
I agree. I would probably like this if it were for Vanity Fair, but what pray tell does a JLaw head-shot have to do with fashion?
ScarJo 's Harper's Bazaar Australia September cover >>>>>
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>>>>> Jennifer Lawrence's American Vogue cover
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Damn ScarJo. This is gorgeous.
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