Jennifer Lawrence Hallucinated On Ambien During This Hunger Games Scene
"Elizabeth Banks got really annoyed with me.”
It wasn’t just Katniss Everdeen who had a strange time taking in the dizzying excesses of the Capitol — Jennifer Lawrence was also falling down the rabbit hole while filming a key Hunger Games scene. The actor revealed that she was experiencing an accidental psychedelic trip during a Catching Fire moment after taking the wrong pill. And it rubbed one of her co-stars the wrong way.
Lawrence told the story while bonding with her Don’t Look Up co-star Leonardo DiCaprio during their Dec. 17 Variety “Actors on Actors” interview. “You and I are both obsessive about sleep when we’re working, like counting the hours,” Lawrence pointed out. She went on to describe how her strong need to get a good night’s rest on film sets led her to accidentally taking a very strong sleep aid before filming a scene in Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
“I also once took an Ambien in the morning, thinking it was something else,” Lawrence said. “It was a dance scene with Philip Seymour Hoffman on the second Hunger Games movie. I was hallucinating. Elizabeth Banks got really annoyed with me.”
Lawrence is referring to the moment when Katniss first meets the new Head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee at the beginning of 2013’s Catching Fire. In the scene, Katniss and Peeta are being paraded around a luxurious Capitol party against their will by Banks’ character, Effie. Luckily for Lawrence, Katniss is meant to seem bewildered and disoriented by the Capitol’s wasteful decadence in this moment, so the Ambien might have actually helped that feeling.
This wasn’t the only time Lawrence got screwed over by mixing up medications. She also shared that an accidental Adderall messed up a filming day on her 2018 spy thriller Red Sparrow.
“When I did Red Sparrow, I took an Adderall instead of a sleeping pill, and then I didn’t sleep all night,” Lawrence said. “I was taking hot showers in a panic. I am not somebody who can function without sleep. And then I had to say the phrase ‘Senate Armed Services Committee’ in a Russian accent. That sucked.”
