Jennifer Lawrence is on the cover of Vogue’s September issue not once but four times, as a part of their 125th anniversary celebration. She’s also the subject of a profile that, depending on your perspective, either lays bare Lawrence’s carefully-honed ability to perform relatability, or the fixation on that concept by those who profile her.
The covers themselves are beautiful in their own Vogue-y way, surely meant to convey just four sides of the dodecahedron that is Jennifer Lawrence. As seen through Annie Leibovitz’s lens, she’s all-American, approachable and glamourous; via Inez Vinoodh, she’s high-fashion; painter John Currin did her the decency of leaving her top on; and Bruce Weber made her look like the girl next door but with a secret. All relatable, all approachable, and very, very, J-Law.
In the piece, written by Jason Gay, Lawrence is self-deprecating in such a way that it almost seems like her default—as if she decided at the start of her career that being a Real Girl in interviews was her thing and that she would stick to it, come hell or high water. (That, or the possibility put forward by those who profile her that she truly won’t or can’t be anything other than herself.)
Consider this story about how crystals, the must-have accessory for the wellness set, “broke” her home and forced her to tuck herself away in a rental deep in the Hollywood hills.
“When I first moved in, the house was crystalled out—crystals everywhere, and geodes,” she explains. “And I was like, ‘Please get rid of these; I don’t want people to come over here and think I’m a crystal person.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
“But everyone told me, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t move them. You have to have the crystal lady who put them in move them. . . . ’ ”
You know where this is going. Lawrence did not get the crystal lady. “I just had all the crystals yanked out. Sold them. And then my fucking house flooded.
“I hate crystals,” Lawrence says.
As magazines like to hit home, particularly about her, she’s just like you: a “regular” person, though she’s quick to refute the fact that she’s ever called herself “regular.” “That’s what other people have said,” she tells Vogue. “If I’d said, ‘I’m a regular person,’ I’d want to kill myself.” If Lawrence won’t say it herself, her famous friends will; the profile includes a hearty endorsement from both Emma Stone and Lawrence’s Mother! co-star Michelle Pfeiffer, both of whom assert that J-Law is “real.”
The piece picks up a little more steam when Lawrence discusses her new film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, a man that Lawrence is now also dating. The trailer for Mother! is vague and scary, as is Gay’s description of the film, which to me sounds like a bunch of adjectives mashed together:
“The themes are just huge,” Lawrence says. “They’re. . . . ” She pauses. “I can’t use the word I want to use, but the movie is unique.”
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.
This, of course, leads to the good stuff—her relationship with Darren Aronofsky, who sounds like a pain in the ass. This anecdote should sum it up nicely:
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?’ ”)
Respectfully, I’m pretty sure that Darren Aronofsky knows who the Kardashians are and is just playing dumb because he has auteur ambitions and is also kind of a dong. Despite his wet blanket-ness, Lawrence still went for it, saying “We had energy...I had energy for him. I don’t know how he felt about me.” For some reason, their relationship works, even though Aronofsky thinks that her “reality TV obsession” is “vastly disappointing.”
I wasn’t expecting Vogue’s over-the-top attempts to make the party line about Jennifer Lawrence compelling yet again, but particularly compared to Darren Aronofsky, she’s a peach. Read the full article here.