Jennifer Lawrence arrived recently at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California. Listen to an actor who made his name in indie movies “many of them critical successes but box-office failures” and went on to play in hundred-million-dollar blockbusters: “I know there are 18,000 trucks and 800 for lunch and the whole thing, but still, within the context of the process, it still feels very intimate. . . . It still feels the same as a film with a 30-person crew.
You’re still doing the work.” Now here’s a young actress in small movies “many of them critical successes but modest hits” who’s about to become the new It Girl of Hollywood: “It’s all filmmaking. The behind-the-scenes is always different: You have a bigger trailer, there’s better food, things like that. I still do the movies for the same reasons.
I still love the script, I love the director, I love the character and the other actors involved. So all of the reasons why I was there, they were all the same.” The first quote was from Johnny Depp. The second, from Jennifer Lawrence. Whether she can go on to Depp-like fame depends on two high-profile films: X-Men: First Class, a superhero movie that opens Friday and The Hunger Games, a science-fiction adventure that hits the screens next March.
Both will rely to a large extent on the appeal of a 20-year-old actress - too old, to some fans of The Hunger Games novels - who is best known for a gritty little adventure about a teenage girl in the Ozarks searching for her father among a dangerous backwoods world of drug dealers and violent loners.
The movie, Winter’s Bone, earned Lawrence an Oscar nomination. She was the second-youngest woman to be nominated for a Best Actress award after Whale Rider’s Keisha Castle-Hughes, whose career since then hasn’t exactly turned her into Johnny Depp.
Lawrence is on a faster track: If the difference between the $2-million Winter’s Bone and the $120-million X-Men prequel (in which she plays Mystique, the character who eventually grows up to be Rebecca Romijn) didn’t guarantee an immediate splash, The Hunger Games cemented it.
She has now officially gone past all the other current IT Girls, who are coined daily in Hollywood. Indeed, many of them rated higher than she did when fans were polled about who should play Katniss Everdeen, the teen warrior who is the heroine in The Hunger Games.
An Entertainment Weekly poll anointed Skins star Kaya Scodelario (with 39 per cent of the votes), followed by Irish up-and-comer Saoirse Ronan (18 percent), with some online rooting for Hailee Steinfeld, who got her own Oscar for last year’s True Grit.
The main objection to Lawrence is her looks “she’s a blond, while Katniss has dark hair, olive skin and grey eyes” and her age. “If this ends up being a success and they make all three books, she’ll be 25 by the time it’s done and looking 30,” one fan wrote.
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