“That makes me feel old as mold,” she said. “I remember being 21 and thinking, ‘My God, one day they’ll redo and remake them. But I’ll be so old by then! I’ll be dead!’”
You get the sense Lawrence is eager to fast-forward past her ingénue period. “Let’s be real, I’m only getting closer to 40,” she said, insisting that the pressure she used to feel “just doesn’t exist for an actress in her 30s.” She has spent fall shooting the comedy “No Hard Feelings,” which romantically pairs her with the young actor Andrew Barth Feldman, “and working with a 20-year-old is so depressing,” Lawrence said. “I’m like, ‘Well, when YouTube was first invented, you were born.’”
“No Hard Feelings” will be the second produced film from Lawrence and Ciarrocchi — “I just want to laugh for two hours and forget about the fact that America is slipping into autocracy,” Lawrence said — but plenty more are planned. She’s particularly excited about “Die, My Love,” an adaptation of the Ariana Harwicz novel that will be directed by Lynne Ramsay, and a biopic of the powerhouse Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, both of which she’ll star in.
She explained that the name of her production company, Excellent Cadaver, is from an old Sicilian phrase for a hit on a major celebrity. But does Lawrence feel like the target on her back has grown smaller over the last few years?
Yes, she said, now that she’s several years removed from “The Hunger Games”: “I’m not scared of 13-year-olds anymore. They have no idea who I am.” Her night out with Adele and her unbothered happy hour with me offered further proof of the change. “I can tell things are different by my interactions in the real world, just by the way that I can move about life,” she said. “There’s an occasional article about me walking out in Ugg boots, but other than that, the interest has lessened, God bless it.”
So who is Jennifer Lawrence, now that she’s done with all of her franchise commitments and can move around relatively unfettered? She told me that before she had signed on to “The Hunger Games” and had to radically re-envision her future, she pictured a life in which she’d work a lot and have a family but fly just enough under the radar to live normally.
“And now, full circle, I’m kind of getting the life that I imagined,” she said. At least she’s got that, even if tomorrow, the whole damn world could go to Pieces.