Jennifer Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress got heated during a new interview with Vogue, while sharing a new perspective she’s formed around politics and civic engagement. “I can’t f**k with people who aren’t political anymore. You live in the United States of America. You have to be political. It’s too dire. Politics are killing people.”
The interview was conducted days after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.
The subject is personal for Lawrence, who shared how politics have created a rift with family members in Kentucky, specifically her father.
“I just worked so hard in the last five years to forgive my dad and my family and try to understand: It’s different. The information they are getting is different. Their life is different,” she explained of the divide, which revealed itself after the election of Donald Trump. “I don’t want to disparage my family, but I know that a lot of people are in a similar position with their families. How could you raise a daughter from birth and believe that she doesn’t deserve equality? How?”
Lawrence, who revealed that in her 20s she had gotten pregnant and planned on having an abortion herself until she miscarried, also got fired up over the fact that the court took away the right to abortion while the majority of Americans believe it should be available to all under certain circumstances. “Get the government out of my snatch. OK?” she said. “It’s too personal to a female’s existence to watch white men debate over uteruses when they from the bottom of their hearts can’t find a clitoris.”
Lawrence covers the October issue of Vogue in a profile penned by Abby Aguirre with images by photographer Tina Barney. It hits just days ahead of the Toronto International Film Festival debut of her latest film, Causeway, directed by Lila Neugebauer, which casts the Oscar winner as an American soldier who returns to her hometown of New Orleans after a traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan.
Causeway marks the first film produced by Lawrence’s production company Excellent Cadaver and Neugebauer praised her star as someone who plays “no games.” She added: “There’s no fortress. She’s present and she’s in it with you and she’s game.”
Lawrence opened up about her desire to take on the role and why she found the part appealing: “Her untenable home, her inability to commit to one thing or another because of these internal injuries that are completely invisible but huge, I think I connected with that at that specific time in my life. So much was going on with me at that time that I didn’t realize. Until I was back, pregnant, married, making it. And I was just like, ‘Oh, this is a woman who is scared to commit.’”
The profile marks Lawrence’s first since becoming a mother. While the writer says they danced around the topic a bit as Lawrence was figuring out how to speak on it and weighing how much she wants to keep private, the actress did say that she had a baby boy and his name is Cy. He’s named after the American painter Cy Twombly, a personal favorite of her husband, Cooke Maroney, an art gallerist.
“It’s so scary to talk about motherhood. Only because it’s so different for everybody. If I say it was amazing from the start, some people will think, ‘It wasn’t amazing for me at first,’ and feel bad. Fortunately, I have so many girlfriends who were honest. Who were like, ‘It’s scary. You might not connect right away. You might not fall in love right away.’ So I felt so prepared to be forgiving. I remember walking with one of my best friends at, like, nine months, and being like, ‘Everyone keeps saying that I will love my baby more than my cat. But that’s not true. Maybe I’ll love him as much as my cat?’”
Still, she did fall in love straight away. “The morning after I gave birth, I felt like my whole life had started over. Like, now is day one of my life. I just stared. I was just so in love. I also fell in love with all babies everywhere. Newborns are just so amazing. They’re these pink, swollen, fragile little survivors. Now I love all babies. Now I hear a baby crying in a restaurant and I’m like, Awwww, preciousssss.”
The cover story also touches on another hot-button issue in Hollywood: equal pay. That subject, too, hits close to home as the Sony hack revealed that Lawrence didn’t make as much as male co-stars Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper. More recently, Vanity Fair reported that Lawrence nabbed $5 million less than Leonardo DiCaprio for Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy Don’t Look Up.
“It doesn’t matter how much I do. I’m still not going to get paid as much as that guy, because of my vagina?” Lawrence asks.
While it’s unclear what her pay is for the upcoming biopic she’s set to star in based on the life of legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, Lawrence is ready to go. “There is almost, and I say this with love and admiration, a sociopathic tendency that I think sometimes I’m jealous of,” Lawrence says of the project, to be directed by Paolo Sorrentino. “I kind of covet the heartlessness that I have no doubt she had to have.”
