My first job in journalism, in 2009, was at a blog called Hollywood Crush—a long-since-deceased vertical that was part of the more recently deceased MTV News. Our subject matter was celebrities under 30, who at that time were still actors rather than influencers, and so I remember vividly the moment when Jennifer Lawrence was suddenly everywhere.
It was 2011 when the then-20-year-old Lawrence became the second-youngest nominee in history for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Winter’s Bone, which first established her as a star on the rise. But in the years that followed, it was her unscripted performances that made her truly famous. She was astonishingly unpretentious, witty, and self-deprecating, and refreshingly human; the night she took home an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, she tripped on her way up the stairs to accept her statuette and met the press corps afterward with the announcement that she’d just taken a shot. And she was savvy, too, all that charm wrapped around a hard kernel of self-awareness. When she stepped away from the spotlight in 2019 after her final performance in the X-Men franchise, it was clear that she knew—maybe even before anyone else—that she’d reached the point of cultural oversaturation where adoration tips over into backlash.
That was unfortunate, because I’ve always enjoyed Lawrence as a cultural presence at least as much as an actress—especially her tendency to say what’s on her mind, even when the common wisdom (and certainly her publicist’s preference) would be that she dial it back. So when she resurfaced this week in a new interview with The New York Times, I was delighted to see she’s still got it. Asked about politics—a topic on which she’s previously been vocal—her response was disarming and unexpected.
