Lawrence liked Scorsese’s idea, and put together an adaptation of “Die, My Love” with her production company. (Scorsese is credited as a producer on the film; next year, he’ll direct Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of “What Happens at Night,” by Peter Cameron, which he read immediately after “Die, My Love.”) Lynne Ramsay, the mercurial Scottish filmmaker, signed on to direct, and Robert Pattinson took the part of the husband, called Jackson in the film. Lawrence’s character is named Grace; rural France has been replaced by Montana. The couple moves there while Grace is pregnant, and we briefly see them wild and free before the baby is born. Their relationship breaks down in the postpartum months, as Grace is driven well past the edge of sanity by isolation, sexual rejection, and the stuff of new motherhood—leaking nipples, laundry baskets, the sight of a man who’s been wearing the same disgusting fucking robe every single day. The film takes a shotgun to certain postpartum clichés: Grace doesn’t care about being a picture-perfect mother, and she’s not too touched-out for sex. She walks around with dirty bare feet and keeps her baby up out of boredom and throws herself violently at Jackson, to no avail.
To different viewers, the movie might seem like a sideways romantic drama, a psychological thriller, or a very dark comedy. It is certainly, like Ramsay’s other films—such as “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which centers on a boy who goes on a killing spree, and his parents—a tone poem of sublimated misery. Lawrence’s previous film was the comedy “No Hard Feelings,” in which her character, a dirtbag Montauk townie paid to deflower the nerd son of out-to-lunch parents, drew closer to her public image than anything she’d done before. Now, in “Die My Love,” her role diverges from that persona more than ever. As Grace, she crawls through tall grass, clutching a butcher knife, and wanders under the predawn moonlight, desperate for someone to fuck her, or maybe to behead her. Her eyes yawn open, crackling with static. She vibrates with restlessness and fury. You can see the cognitive distance between her and reality increasing, inch by inch, in her face.
Lawrence has sat for dozens of magazine profiles since she was a teen-ager. She’s drunk cheap bourbon with reporters in her back yard and got in a sauna for scene and color. But she’s become more sparing with press in the past half decade. In late September, she and a publicist sat in a side room at Via Carota, an unflashy but impossibly in-demand celebrity-magnet restaurant in the West Village. I walked in and said hello. Lawrence confessed that, just before she left the house, her too-small mouth guard had got stuck in her mouth. “Can you imagine?” she said. “After ten years of being, like, ‘I used to be folksy, but everyone thought everything was a shtick,’ then I show up for my first day of this, like”—she did a Farrelly-brothers-style impression of clumsy, mouth-guard-wearing Jen. “I was, like, I will do anything to prevent this from happening. It would be like if I tripped and fell on my way into the room.”
Lawrence has a low voice and is beautiful in a manner that feels unstingy. She was dressed like the wealthy millennial mother that she is: a soft red cardigan over a white shirt, a white skirt with a black sweater around her waist, a gold pendant, black sandals. Her long, dark-blond bangs were a little messy. In person, as onscreen, she’s often very still; her face, with its rounded cheekbones and straight planes, will become marble-like and sculptural. Then everything rearranges in a swarm of sudden feeling.
“Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again,’ ” Lawrence told her fellow-actor Viola Davis a few years ago, adding, “I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.” I got the sense that, with me, she was trying to be careful. She seemed conscious of a lesson learned at peak fame: she doesn’t want to be the trick pony; she wants to be the rider holding the reins. Still, frequently, something unbridled would burst through. Soon after I sat down, Lawrence asked me if it was O.K. if she “vaped . . . constantly,” then noted that she’d have to stop in November, when she planned to get her boobs done. (Nicotine constricts blood vessels—bad for tissue healing.) Later, we discussed the cervical details of our respective childbirth experiences, and she cheerfully offered the phrase “huge vagina.”
Cartoon by Ellie Black
When I mentioned going through old articles about her, she winced. “Oh, no,” she said. “So hyper. So embarrassing.” I said that it must have been self-alienating to have people demand and obsess over her genuine personality, and then to decide that it was fake. “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she said. The pedestal of fame had felt treacherous and false: “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ ” Lawrence had anticipated the turn in public opinion long before it happened, and rarely felt at ease. “I was young, I lived alone, I was being chased,” she said. Paparazzi followed her when she drove around in Los Angeles; at night, adrenaline threw off her sleep. She had too many projects and was doing too much press, and she felt “pissed,” she said. “I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on ‘S.N.L.’ was spot-on.” (“I’m just, like, a snackaholic,” Grande said, in 2016, on a “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch, sporting a tight dress and a perfectly groomed blond wig. “I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”) But the backlash did make her life seem “uninhabitable,” Lawrence said. “I felt—I didn’t feel, I was, I think—rejected not for my movies, not for my politics, but for me, for my personality.”
