Notes

I’ll say this: Mother! is an unsettling, multilayered film in which Lawrence gives a devastatingly beautiful performance that is equal parts vulnerability and rage and unlike anything she’s done before. The film jarred me for days after I saw it, and I want—need—to see it again. I think it’s going to be the kind of film that people argue about at dinner parties for months, if not years.
I also can’t believe I took Lawrence to a sensory-deprivation tank after she saw it. That’s not the place you want to be.

This is what Aronofsky does, of course. A celebrated director (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan), the 48-year-old Brooklyn native has never been afraid of challenging the audience. “I think [Mother!] works as a truthful, realistic relationship movie . . . but also works on an allegorical plane, too,” the soft-spoken director tells me in a New York City editing suite in early summer. At the moment, only a handful of people have seen the film, and Aronofsky is cautious about saying anything revealing. “Different people will see it different ways, and I’m always inspired by films you remember and are still talking about a few days later.”

After writing the script in a flurry—five days, he says—Aronofsky was thrilled to get Lawrence for the part, considering her hectic schedule and the fact that Mother! would begin with three months of rehearsals in a Brooklyn warehouse involving the primary cast, which besides Lawrence and Pfeiffer includes Javier Bardem and Ed Harris.

“To get that type of commitment from an actor is hard,” he says. “To get it from the biggest actors in the world is really, really hard. It was an amazing luxury to have that much time.”

Lawrence admits she wasn’t a rehearsal person before making Mother! but says that the process made her the most “in tune” she’s ever been with a character. Aronofsky describes Lawrence’s process during rehearsal as almost low-key—“She’s in a very Zen, peaceful gear”—and says she didn’t unleash the full arsenal of her performance until cameras were rolling.

“It’s such a raw, natural talent she has,” he continues, with a touch of wonderment. “I always kind of compare her to Michael Jordan.”

“She’s a very brave actress with no boundaries and doesn’t need to be hurt in order to create pain,” says Bardem, adding that Lawrence has the “strength of a bull. . . . She’s truly committed to go as far as needed.”

“I hate talking about acting because it’s so hard to talk about it without sounding like a douche,” Lawrence says in her ever-Lawrence way. But she says there were moments in Mother! that were unlike anything she’d experienced as a performer. “I had to go to a darker place than I’ve ever been in my life. . . . I didn’t know if I’d be able to come out OK.”

One moment during filming got so intense, Lawrence says, that she hyperventilated and dislocated a rib. “I ended up getting on oxygen,” she says. “I have oxygen tubes in my nostrils, and Darren’s like, ‘It was out of focus; we’ve got to do it again.’ And I was just like, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”

Wanting to protect Lawrence’s well-being amid that darkness, some of the Mother! crew assembled a “Kardashian tent” for the actress off set—a refuge where she could get away from the work and decompress with her chatty friends from reality TV. “It was a tent that had pictures of the Kardashians and Keeping Up with the Kardashians playing on a loop—and gumballs,” Lawrence says. “My happy place.”

(“I wasn’t involved in that,” says Aronofsky. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about, ‘the Kardashians?’ ”)
Not long after Mother! wrapped, stories began circulating that Lawrence and Aronofsky were an item. Lawrence says the pair began seeing each other after the movie finished.

“We had energy,” Lawrence says, then adds drily: “I had energy for him. I don’t know how he felt about me.”
We’ve finished our hour in sensory-deprivation tanks and have stopped for a cup of coffee up the street. Lawrence says her tank experience was mostly positive until the end, when she realized she’d spun herself around and couldn’t find the hatch opening, and had a brief moment of panic until she located it and got out. “Disorienting,” she says. “But other than that, I had a lovely time.”

The truth is, she can’t stop thinking about Mother! She’d sat with Aronofsky and watched it just a couple of hours before. She’d gone in bracing for the darkness but was taken with how beautiful she found it.
“When I saw the movie, I was reminded all over again how brilliant he is,” she says of Aronofsky. “For the past year, I’ve been dealing with him as just a human.” She praises Aronofsky as an “amazing father” (the director has a son from a prior relationship with the actress Rachel Weisz) and for his directness of purpose. “I’ve been in relationships before where I am just confused. And I’m never confused with him.”

Lawrence and Aronofsky do seem like opposites in some ways, and there’s the age difference, but the partnership clearly appears to be working. “I normally don’t like Harvard people, because they can’t go two minutes without mentioning that they went to Harvard,” she says. “He’s not like that.”

Lawrence’s reality-television obsession, however, continues to cause a bit of an impasse with Aronofsky.
“He just finds it so vastly disappointing,” she says, then laughs.

In recent years, Lawrence has found herself at the front of the growing discussion over gender pay inequality in moviemaking and the workplace in general. Her own awakening happened, oddly, because of a hack: The infiltration of Sony emails in 2014 revealed that Lawrence’s compensation for the film American Hustle had been less than that of her male costars. Rather than staying silent, she chose to speak publicly about it, writing a funny but pointed essay for Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s “Lenny Letter” in which she lamented getting paid “less . . . than the lucky people with dicks,” and railed against the idea of women being expected to be polite in negotiation, lest they be called “difficult.”

“I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable,” Lawrence wrote. “Fuck that. I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard. It’s just heard.”

What made Lawrence’s letter go viral was not only its authenticity (it was, word for word, pure Lawrence) but that the criticism was coming from someone in a presumed position of power: Lawrence has been one of the most successful and highest-paid actors for several years now. In 2015 and 2016, Forbes placed her at the top of its list of highest-paid actresses, thanks largely to Hunger Games and X-Men. If she was still vulnerable to being taken advantage of, what actress was not?

“My thing with talking about pay equality is not—I use myself as an example, but that’s not what I’m talking about, obviously,” Lawrence says. “I’m not talking about actresses getting paid millions less than their male costars.” Rather, she says, she saw the moment as an opportunity to address a gender pay gap that exists in almost any work environment. If critics shouted, “Shut up and act!” so be it.

“My opinion is: You can have millions of dollars and a dream career, but if you’re not willing to stand up for what you believe, or if you see wrongdoing and don’t talk about it, then you have nothing,” Lawrence says.

“It’s the opposite of ‘Shut up and act!’ If you have a voice, use it. I don’t want to go into the grave just being like, ‘Well, I introduced the world to the Hunger Games movies and I bought a house on Coldwater! Goodnight!’ For me, it’s worth the criticism. The more criticism I get, the more the conversation is happening.”

Meanwhile, amid these rancorous political times, Lawrence has become a board member of an organization called Represent.Us, which seeks to pass anticorruption laws in local, state, and national government. There are conservative as well as liberal voices in the organization, which Lawrence likes. “If you’re a Republican, if you’re liberal, it doesn’t matter,” she says. The goal is “getting money and corruption out of politics” and “freeing our democracy.”

Lawrence is no fan of the current Trump administration, but “there needs to be a bridge,” she says. “We can’t continue this divide and anger. There are issues affecting us as human beings, not as liberals and not as Republicans. We have to protect the foundation of this country, and acceptance. If you’re preaching acceptance, accept immigrants, accept Muslims, accept everybody.”

Soon Lawrence was set to begin filming another X-Men, her fourth installment of the Marvel juggernaut (She jokes about what it’s like to be in such a special effects–driven movie. “When I do an X-Men movie, I have no idea what is going on,” she confesses. “Then I see it and I’m like, ‘Whoa! Cool!’ ”). She took a summer trip to Paris for the couture shows and a photo shoot as a face of Dior, a label partner she loves but an environment that still feels surreal to her. She’s excited by the installment of former Valentino boss Maria Grazia Chiuri as Dior’s artistic director. “The new stuff has been really amazing, cool and young,” she says. “She’s awesome.” (There’s also an episode in June when a plane Lawrence is flying on suffers a double engine failure and is forced to make an emergency landing—nobody’s hurt, but the incident is understandably frightening.)

After X-Men, Lawrence is likely to move on to one of a handful of impressive-looking projects. Among the films she’s tied to are a Steven Spielberg movie about the wartime photographer Lynsey Addario, whom Lawrence has already spent time shadowing, and one about Zelda Fitzgerald directed by Ron Howard. There’s also Adam McKay’s take on the Silicon Valley Theranos scandal unmasked by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (Lawrence is attached to play Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes). And she was recently spotted having a lunch meeting with Quentin Tarantino, who is reportedly at work on a script about the Manson Family murders.

Oh, and there’s the Untitled Jennifer Lawrence/Amy Schumer Project. The Internet lost its mind a couple of years ago when Lawrence befriended Schumer after seeing Trainwreck, and the pair were photographed riding on a Jet Ski together and said to be collaborating on a script.
“We’re meeting with directors,” Lawrence says. She describes the plot as “dysfunctional twins. But it’s sad. Then funny.”

"Ela é a pessoa mais engraçada que eu já conheci," Lawrence disse sobre Schumer. "Ela também é essa atriz incrível de drama, a qual eu quero trazer a tona."

“Jen is funny like a comic,” Schumer writes in an email. “She understands the rhythm of a joke and how to play both the straight man and the idiot. She has one of the darkest senses of humor I’ve ever encountered and it’s delightful. My only problem with her is that she’s fat.”

For Hollywood, a Lawrence/Schumer caper would be a dream combination—and a reminder that for all that Jennifer Lawrence has accomplished so far, so quickly, there are still so many places left she can go. Lawrence jokes that after her next flurry of films she’ll need to take some more time off (“The American public—the international public—will need a break from me . . . even the aliens are annoyed”), but it’s obvious she loves what she does. A bourbon by the fire is nice, but let’s be real. You can only sit still for so long.