Jennifer Lawrence Once Said the Biggest Mistake ‘The Hunger Games’ Made Was ‘Casting Me’
Jennifer Lawrence changed her career after starring in The Hunger Games franchise. But she once quipped that making her the face of the long-running series might not have been the best idea in hindsight.
Why Jennifer Lawrence said ‘Hunger Games’ made a mistake casting her
Lawrence helped make The Hunger Games movies a multi-billion dollar franchise. But she was hesitant about taking the role at first knowing how much her life might change afterwards.
“I almost didn’t do Hunger Games because Twilight had come out and that fandom had happened,” Lawrence told The Rewatchables not too long ago. “When I was trying to talk to people about making this decision after Hunger Games got offered to me, it was hard to explain to people this level of fame.”
Lawrence was nervous of attracting the attention that Kristen Stewart did at the height of her own Twilight popularity. But she went with her instincts and decided to do the films, which caused her status in Hollywood to explode.
As she predicted, however, she had trouble adjusting to her growing fame. But she was able to find some humor under these new circumstances.
“I am a troll. I hate myself. I think the movie is great, but their biggest mistake was [casting] me,” Lawrence once said on The Late Show with David Letterman (via Digital Spy). “Out of the four premieres, I’ve tripped in two or three of them. Like, massive trips. It’s so scary and then I end up getting so nervous that I get really hyper. So then I go do interviews and I’m like, ‘I’m like a Chihuahua. I’m shaking. I’m peeing!’ And then afterwards I’m like, ‘I just talked about peeing on the red carpet!’”
Jennifer Lawrence recently shared ‘The Hunger Games’ had a worrying impact on her craft
Lawrence was able to rely on having steady and lucrative work as long as she was a part of The Hunger Games series. In hindsight, she had fond memories of the franchise and what it meant to its fans. On Variety’s Actors on Actors, Lawrence reflected on how her Hunger Games role further paved the way for female action films.
“We were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,” she said. “And it just makes me so happy every single time I see a movie come out that just blows through every one of those beliefs, and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies. To keep certain people in the same positions that they’ve always been in.”
But doing Hunger Games wasn’t without its drawbacks. The popularity of the films meant that attention was constantly on her, which influenced her own acting.
“I couldn’t really be an observer of life because everybody was observing me. I could feel my craft suffering. And I didn’t know how to fix it,” she said.
This resulted in Lawrence choosing to do certain films for the wrong reasons.
“I was scrambling,” she said. “Trying to fix it by saying yes to this movie and then trying to counteract it with that movie. And not realizing that what I had to do was no movies until something spoke to me.”
Jennifer Lawrence would love returning to ‘The Hunger Games’ franchise
Lawrence’s role in the Hunger Games came to an end with 2015’s Mockingjay Part 2. But the franchise itself hasn’t ended, as a prequel film The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is scheduled to be released soon. This may open the window for Lawrence to return to the franchise, which she recently shared she’d be delighted to do.
“Oh, my God – totally,” she recently told Variety. “If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent.”
