Years ago, at the peak of the “Hunger Games” phenomenon, Lionsgate spent heavily on lavish parties to promote the franchise at the Cannes Film Festival. Private villas were rented and transformed into extravagant replicas of the movies’ opulent Capitol, complete with servers in eccentric wigs, chocolate fountains that flowed for hours and enough colorful macarons to feed a small city.
Though the organizers had clearly missed the film’s critique of capitalist excess, the “Hunger Games” villa parties were still a decadent good time. But what’s surprising is that for years, those soirees were the only thing that ever lured the series’ star, Jennifer Lawrence, to Cannes. Despite being the kind of glamorous, Oscar-winning actress the festival loves to showcase, Lawrence has never starred in a film premiering at Cannes until now.
At a Sunday news conference for the movie “Die My Love,” she seemed just as surprised. Turning to her director, Lynne Ramsay, Lawrence said, “I really cannot believe that I’m here with you and this happened.” But the film, which is already the subject of awards chatter for Lawrence’s no-holds-barred performance, is another indication that the 34-year-old actress is itching to push further into darker, riskier material.
Adapted from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, the drama stars Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as Grace and Jackson, a young couple struggling with Grace’s postpartum depression. At first, she just appears a bit listless, muttering to herself and snapping at chatty cashiers who try to draw her into conversation. “Everybody gets a little loopy the first year,” advises her mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. “You’ll come back.”
But Grace doesn’t. As tension continues to build with Jackson, she begins acting out in increasingly upsetting ways — hurling herself through a glass door, stripping down to her underwear at a child’s party — just to feel anything that might snap her out of her stupor. Though the film is not an easy watch, Lawrence dives into her character’s descent with full commitment.
At the news conference, the actress said she was four months pregnant with her second child when she began shooting the film. “I had great hormones,” she said, “which is really the only kind of way I would be able to dip into this sort of visceral emotion.” Still, she had to draw a strong line between herself and the character.
“As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do,” Lawrence said.
Asked whether parenthood had changed her creatively, Lawrence nodded. “I didn’t know that I could feel so much, and my job has a lot to do with emotion,” she said. “It’s almost like feeling like a blister, so sensitive. They’ve changed my life obviously for the best and they’ve changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”
Her co-star Pattinson concurred. “Having a baby gives you the biggest trove of energy and inspiration,” he said.
Lawrence raised an eyebrow: “You get energy?”
“It’s a different kind of energy,” Pattinson said, adding with a laugh, “This question’s impossible for a guy to answer correctly.”
When I interviewed Lawrence three years ago, she spoke eagerly about developing projects like “Die My Love,” calling it the sort of challenging drama that her agents used to dissuade her from doing at the height of her “Hunger Games” fame. (In 2018, she left CAA, the agency that represented her for 10 years.) With Ramsay’s movie, she knew she had thrown herself into the deep end the day before shooting began, when the director told her and Pattinson that she wanted a scene in the two would attack each other like tigers.
“Lynne’s like, ‘And you’ll do it naked, yeah?’” Lawrence recalled. “And that was the first day!”
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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