Jennifer Lawrence Gets Why People Found Her Personality "Annoying"
She felt the public turn on her, and she can see why.
There was a time when Jennifer Lawrence’s quirky relatability made her one of the most beloved celebrities of the 2010s. And then, as it so often does, public perception flipped upside-down. Suddenly, people seemed to find Lawrence’s once-beloved candid quips to be “crass” or off-putting, possibly because of The Hunger Games star’s overexposure in the media at the time. Lawrence opened up about how this palpable shift in how she was received led to a complicated relationship with doing press, admitting she agrees that in those early years, she was “annoying” as a “defense mechanism.”
“Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again,’” Lawrence told The New Yorker in an Oct. 27 profile. She went on to recall how she cringes at her early interviews: “So hyper. So embarrassing.”
The actor mused over how the public began to believe she was putting on a front in her 2010s heyday, saying there was a bit of truth to that observation. “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” Lawrence said. “It was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’”
Looking back at that era now, she can’t be too upset with people who were put off by her. “I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying,” Lawrence said. “I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying.” She singled out Ariana Grande’s impression of her on a 2016 Saturday Night Live episode as being “spot-on.” In the Celebrity Family Feud parody, Grande mimicked the actor’s deep voice to bravely admit she’s a “snackaholic,” which was mocked within the sketch as being “annoyingly relatable.”
While Lawrence can see how she may have rubbed people the wrong way, she does find it strange that it was her very personhood and not her career or views that caused the opinion on her to turn so severely: “I felt—I didn’t feel, I was, I think—rejected not for my movies, not for my politics, but for me, for my personality.”
