Interview: Jennifer Lawrence, actress

Published on Wednesday 8 September 2010 12:43

'NO-ONE ever believes me," says Jennifer Lawrence, "it's the stupidest story." Lawrence who has just turned 20, and is the star of Winter's Bone, is referring to the fairytale way she landed her first agent after being spotted on a New York street while on holiday with her family aged 14.

Only 20, Jennifer Lawrence already has several films under her belt Picture: Getty

"Someone asked to take my picture," she shrugs, "and then I went into all these agencies and got an agent." Though she'd had vague aspirations to act prior to this, it wasn't until she was given a script to read through that she realised she'd found her calling. "It was the weirdest thing because I understood it. I don't really know how to describe it, but I just knew that this was the thing I was made for."

Lawrence's nascent career seems to have had plenty of serendipitous moments like this. When she was 13, for example, she remembers thinking Charlize Theron's transformative Oscar-winning performance in Monster was amazing. Three years later she was cast as Theron's younger self in The Burning Plain. Then there's her role as Ree Dolly in Winter's Bone. "My mum had read the book five years before and told me that if they ever made it into a movie, I'd be perfect for it. And five years later here we are. I have no idea what in the world she thought we had in common."

There's certainly a world of difference between the grungy, terse, hard-bitten teen searching for her missing father that she plays with such authority in the film and the glamorous star in the making sitting before me in an anonymous Edinburgh hotel room. She may apologise for having food stuck in her teeth - the result of wolfing down a sandwich between interviews - and she may cheerfully recount stories in her throaty Kentucky accent about learning to skin a squirrel, shoot a gun and chop wood for the film, but it's not difficult to see why she's suddenly being fast-tracked onto the A-list.

Like Theron before her, she has that enviable combination of genuine dramatic talent and supermodel looks. With gun-jumping predictability, the film magazines are already proclaiming her Winter's Bone performance a dead cert to feature at next year's Oscars and she's just landed a plum role in the next summer's big comic-book movie prequel X-Men: First Class.

And that's on top of a slate of movies already awaiting release, including The Beaver - Jodie Foster's bizarre-sounding comedy featuring Mel Gibson as a troubled family man who communicates via a hand-puppet - and an improvised romantic drama called Like Crazy that she has just finished shooting with her co-star from The Beaver, Anton Yelchin.

It's a whirlwind trajectory that suggests an actor keen to avoid being boxed in by her looks or her choices - an experience with which she's already more than familiar.In order to secure her role in Winter's Bone, for instance, she had to fly to an audition on the red-eye and let her hair go lank to ensure she looked weathered enough for the part.

Ironically, she faced a different problem on The Beaver. After seeing some clips from Winter's Bone, director Jodie Foster didn't think Lawrence could be funny. "My agent was going to set up a Skype call with her. I guess I was supposed to make her laugh or something, but instead I flew out to New York to meet her and she was like, 'Oh, she's an idiot, she can do comedy.'"

Given that Foster starred in Freaky Friday the same year she did Taxi Driver, didn't she find that initial reluctance odd? "I know! I thought it was weird for an actor to not believe in acting."