Jennifer Lawrence is in the process of a reinvention. After taking a few years off of acting around the apex of her career and getting married to art gallery director Cooke Maroney in 2019 (the couple welcomed their first child earlier this year), the 32-year-old is appearing in her first starring vehicle in over four years, the psychological drama Causeway, premiering on Apple TV Plus this Friday, Nov. 4.
It’s not quite the high-profile project Lawrence has become known for — who got her Oscar-nominated breakthrough playing a troubled teen in 2010’s Winter’s Bone, followed by the Hunger Games franchise, her Academy Award-winning role in Silver Linings Playbook, and everything in between — but that’s fully by design.
In a new profile with the New York Times, Lawrence admits that at the height of her fame, even she could see the writing was on the wall, and that the backlash was beginning to mount. As much as Hollywood audiences love fresh faces, they seem to like tearing them down even more.
However, there was one movie in particular in which Lawrence says she knew wasn’t going to win her any critical adulation: the 2016 science-fiction comedy-drama Passengers, which she starred in alongside Chris Pratt. Despite the film’s successful showing at the box office, with just a 30 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes it remains the most critically panned movie of Lawrence’s career. (And not for nothing, but around that same time, audiences were likewise starting to experience fatigue when it came to Pratt, who has had no such self awareness about taking a step back.)
“I was like, ‘Oh no, you guys are here because I’m here, and I’m here because you’re here. Wait, who decided that this was a good movie?'”
Was there a certain title that made her feel that way? “Passengers, I guess,” Lawrence said, singling out the lambasted 2016 sci-fi romance she starred in with Chris Pratt. “Adele told me not to do it! She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her.”
In addition to the waning interest in the film’s two leads, the film was subsequently lambasted over its premise, which involves a mechanical engineer named Jim accidentally being awakened from a hibernation pod in a space sleeper ship, and subsequently waking up a woman named Aurora to keep him company because he falls in love with her — knowing that both will die before the ship ever reaches its destination.
And instead of being fully horrified when she learns the truth, Aurora instead decides to stay with Jim and the two spend their lives happily ever after on the ship until both of them eventually die, giving hope to incels everywhere.
In other words, the moral of the story here is always listen to Adele. Always.