Jennifer Lawrence wanted to do more ‘weird things’. Die My Love fits the bill

In 2018 Jennifer Lawrence cut ties with her agents, the star-management behemoth CAA. You have to assume that CAA would have been surprised, given the phenomenal success they had carved out together. It started with the 2010 film Winter’s Bone, in which she played the 17-year-old anchor of a dilapidated family in the Ozarks with a depth of empathetic understanding that earned her a best-newcomer award from the National Board of Review. At 22 she became the second-youngest woman to win the best-actress Oscar, for Silver Linings Playbook. By 2015 she had racked up four Academy Award nominations.

Meanwhile, her starring role in The Hunger Games franchise – and as Mystique in X-Men – had made her one of the most recognised faces in cinema. Each of the Hunger Games movies broke box-office records. So did her pay cheques; by 2015 Jennifer Lawrence was the highest-paid actress in the world. Mobbed by teenage fans of plucky Katniss Everdeen, she was also garlanded with critical admiration – Rolling Stone’s critic called her “some kind of miracle”.

If you think of a public figure as a Russian doll, that was the outermost layer. Just beneath was an artist who knew she wasn’t getting the kind of scripts she wanted because her representatives insisted that audiences didn’t want to see her in small films. “I found out that a lot of filmmakers that I really loved and admired had scripts that weren’t even reaching me,” she would tell The New York Times years later. Meanwhile, she couldn’t go anywhere in public without security guards. “I don’t know how I can act,” she said, “when I feel cut off from normal human interaction. I had let myself be hijacked.”

So, after wrapping reshoots for her last X-Men film, she took a two-year break from acting. Google her and you see one of the most-asked questions under her name is “whatever happened to Jennifer Lawrence?” It’s quite possible the people who typed in that query still don’t know the answer because this is what happened: Don’t Look Up, a ferociously strange sci-fi directed by maverick Adam McKay; Causeway, in which she plays a soldier trying to recover from a traumatic brain injury; and two hard-hitting documentaries about women’s rights.

Also, this: motherhood and marriage. In 2018, while she was raging against the Hollywood machine, she met art dealer Cooke Maroney. They married the following year and now have two boys, aged 3½ and six months. That will alter anyone’s focus, I imagine.

“Well, it definitely helps me weed out anything not essential,” says Lawrence when we meet at the San Sebastian Film Festival – where she will also receive a lifetime achievement award, the youngest person to do so, at the grand age of 35 – to discuss her latest film. “I mean, it’s got to be something I absolutely have to make, that burns every one of those creative fires to be worth it.”

Die My Love, her new film, is an extraordinary volley of passion directed by Lynne Ramsay, the remarkable Scottish filmmaker who made Ratcatcher (1999), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017). Lawrence is the spinning centre of the film as Grace, an aspiring writer from New York, who moves with her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) to a house he has inherited in the Midwest. They imagine themselves on a rustic adventure, but after they have a baby their marriage, and Grace herself, start to disintegrate.

If the stars aligned as they ought, her vivid, utterly unpredictable performance would win Lawrence her second Academy Award, but none of Ramsay’s films – despite winning numerous prizes in Europe – has come within shouting distance of the Oscars. Lawrence, by contrast, says she has wanted to work with Ramsay since she saw Ratcatcher (presumably well after it came out, since she was then only nine years old). Lawrence approached her to ask if she would consider turning Ariana Harwicz’s novella Die, My Love – given to her as a potential project for her production company by Martin Scorsese, no less – into a film.

“She hadn’t worked in a while, so I knew it was a long shot,” Lawrence says. “But I sent it to her and, by a miracle, she said yes.”

Ostensibly Grace is suffering postpartum depression, which has become the film’s talking point at successive festivals. Ramsay sees this as an oversimplification of what is really the implosion of a life.

“While that’s an aspect of what is happening to her, it’s also about being isolated, about the marriage falling apart, about different aspects of motherhood – what it’s like when your sexuality changes, and her sex life changes. I never like to say something is one thing. To me, ‘postpartum’ is too much of an easy answer.”

It was Grace’s complexity that interested her. “I also felt like she’s a bit of a feral animal; she’s very unapologetic for how she is, which is really interesting. I hadn’t seen that before.”

Lawrence didn’t identify with Grace’s experience of motherhood; she hadn’t suffered from postpartum depression herself. She had an immediate response, however, to a character who could not resist whatever impulses erupted in her mind. “We all have those thoughts. You know, if you go past a car and see the keys in the ignition, you think: ‘what if I just got into that car and drove away?’ That’s what I wanted to see in the cinema, but done correctly – as I thought only Lynne could do it.”

There were many discussions beforehand but no rehearsals; the actors reacted to each other and the house, which feels like a watchful presence, in the moment. “I talked a lot with Lynne about the character but there is a lot of stuff I don’t know until I get in there,” says Lawrence. “The costume really helps. Based on what my costume was each day, I’d think, ‘OK, is she still sticking out like a sore thumb, looking like a New Yorker in Montana? Or is she starting to blend in?’ But then I don’t have any answers to anything until I’m with Rob and he’s giving me something and I’m giving it back.”

“It was actually really fun because Jennifer was no-holds-barred,” says Ramsay. “I gave them loads of space to play. There’s a great scene where she’s bored, standing in the kitchen, and I said, ‘Just walk up to the window’ – and she walked up and started licking it. For some reason! She was so free with this character, you never knew what would happen next.”

It helped, Lawrence would say at the Cannes Film Festival, that she was four months pregnant with her younger child when they were shooting. “I had great hormones, which is really the only way I would be able to dip into this sort of visceral emotion.”

Grace’s great underlying fear, she believes, is becoming invisible. Out on the prairie, she knows, no one will see her scream. At home Jackson is sullenly unable to deal with the transformation of his cool wife into this virago; he just wants her the way she was. Only his mother, played by the great Sissy Spacek, seems to see Grace and accept her for what she has become.

“It’s interesting,” says Lawrence. “In the book the mother-in-law is quite tedious. But there isn’t a tedious bone in Sissy’s body – she’s just the sweetest, most loving grandmother in real life – and I think she just has so much love to give that having her in that role changed that relationship.”

Grace, in turn, finds ways to talk to her father-in-law (Nick Nolte), who is drifting into the deep snow of dementia. Unlike anyone else in the family she can enter the world of his second childhood.

As someone who has lived with the strain of being relentlessly visible, can Lawrence imagine feeling unseen? “Yeah! Because when you are a public person everybody makes assumptions about you. Or you see things written about yourself that aren’t true, or you feel this kind of generality that’s not anything to do with you. When I do press, or when I’m on a red carpet, that kind of feels like an extension of a role. It’s very different from how I feel when I’m in bed with my husband or having dinner with my girlfriends.”

Or, indeed, being with small children. “Yes. This is somehow so much easier,” she says, with a characteristic flicker of irony. “And less exhausting.”

Lawrence started acting professionally after she was spotted by a talent scout in the street at 14, then dropped out of school to pursue her career. She makes a joke of being uneducated but isn’t prepared to regret it; if her boys wanted to go down the same path she would support them. “I had my parents’ support; it changed my life and I’m so grateful I get to do this. I mean, I get to be an artist, I get to turn feelings and confusion and conflict into something beautiful.”

What if she had had a different life? Every time she takes on a role she must wonder what it might be like to be this astronaut, that con man’s moll, this girlfriend for hire, that soldier with PTSD. “Yeah! I mean, I do that constantly! Obviously, when you’re in a film, it’s very easy to fill in the background of what that life would be like.

“But I feel, maybe because I’ve been playing people for most of my life, that I’m very open and observational of people. Sometimes, as I look into the windows of homes as I’m driving by, I can feel exactly what living in that house would be like even if I’ve never been in it. I think that just comes from a lifetime of studying characters and life. And maybe it’s false and a complete projection but I’ve always done that, even before I knew I would be an actor.”

Is it difficult to find ways to watch the world when you can’t melt into the wallpaper? Actually, these days she feels she can. “I live in New York. New Yorkers don’t give a shit. I go to exercise class, I go to restaurants, I take my kid to school. You know, I’m in the world. I talk to everybody. I like connecting and talking to people and, for the most part, everybody is very respectful.”

A couple of years ago there was a flare of interest when she and Adele joined a drinking game in a local dive bar, but fame isn’t the burden it was.

All that said, she still loves the Hunger Games films. If the chance brought Katniss Everdeen back into her life, she said a year ago in response to a question from Variety she would “100 per cent” be up for it. Right now she says she wouldn’t necessarily refuse a role in a blockbuster, despite the risk of losing her hard-won normal life. Possibly.

“I think it’s like a case-by-case thing,” she says. “I read something recently that was a big-budget sci-fi that I thought was awesome. And I would have loved to have done it – if I didn’t have kids. But also, I just thought, ‘what if it takes up this much space and then I don’t get to make that weird thing that nobody will get, a few months later?’“

Because that’s Jennifer Lawrence’s job now, right? “Exactly!” From here on in she does what she wants.

Die My Love opens on November 6.

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