Having won an Academy Award from four nominations, headlined a multi-billion dollar blockbuster franchise and firmly established herself as one of her generation’s finest talents, we’re hardly in a position to question Jennifer Lawrence’s preparations for getting into character.
Method acting isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t really Lawrence’s bag either, but she did admit during a recent Q&A held by Variety to coincide with a screening of Netflix disaster comedy Don’t Look Up that she replicated the personal preferences of her character Kate Dibiasky, a graduate student seeking a career in astronomy who ends up discovering a comet with the potential to cause apocalyptic devastation.
The only problem was, Lawrence decided to get high right before she was shooting scenes opposite acting royalty Meryl Streep, and even when cameras had stopped rolling the crew couldn’t stop messing with her due to the altered state of mind she’d embodied in an effort to boost her performance.
“I know what you’re going to say, and I wasn’t pregnant at the time… I think so, just nobody tell my mother-in-law. Because my character was getting high in the movie. I was a real target. Everyone was f*cking with me… I guess because I was high. Easy to f*ck with.”
Don’t Look Up has been winning strong early notices and is shaping up as a serious awards season contender, and at least we know Lawrence had to suffer for her art by getting high right before going toe-to-toe with Streep playing no less an authority figure than the President of the United States.