Jennifer Lawrence is opening up about the emotional toll that comes with releasing a movie, admitting that the process can feel “awful” no matter how proud she is of the work.
In a new conversation with V Magazine, the actor explained that the months leading up to a film’s debut fill her with anxiety because she never knows how audiences will react, even when she believes in the project wholeheartedly.
She shared that the fear comes from experience.
“The experience only adds to the dread, because I’ve had so many experiences of working so hard on something, loving something so deeply, and then releasing it to the world, and the world just being like, ‘Boo! Hate you!’ It is so awful,” Lawrence said.
She added that every time she starts a new film, she somehow forgets the part where public judgment returns. “I mean, I’m very blessed and very lucky. But it’s a very scary few months.”
Lawrence also talked about how surprising this is for her husband, who doesn’t come from the same world of public scrutiny.
She recalled telling him about her anxiety, only for him to reassure her that the movie was great. She told him that wasn’t always what mattered.
“People might not get it,” she said, remembering his response, “But they’re wrong.” Even though he meant to comfort her, she joked that it didn’t exactly take the pressure away.
The actor is currently promoting her new drama Die My Love, in which she plays a mother spiraling into psychosis.
Robert Pattinson appears as her husband in the film, directed by Lynne Ramsay. As Lawrence has stepped back into the spotlight for the movie’s press tour, she’s been candid about how interviews and heavy public attention have affected her over the years.
She has spoken before about stepping away from Hollywood for two years after feeling that the public had grown tired of her.
She told Vanity Fair in 2021 that she herself had also grown tired of her public persona.
More recently, she reflected in The New Yorker on why audiences may have “rejected” her at one point, admitting she now finds some of her older interviews hard to watch.
She said she understands it because her loud, unfiltered personality was partly real and partly a defense mechanism. Looking back at those moments, she said, “that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying.”
With Die My Love now playing in theaters nationwide, Lawrence is continuing to speak openly about the complicated relationship between creativity, vulnerability, and public judgment, and how even after all these years, releasing a film still feels “scary.”
