“To me, the biggest celebrities in the world are, like, Pete Davidson,” Jennifer Lawrence says when speaking to W Magazine for its 2023 Best Performances issue. Jennifer, 32, heads into the awards show season with rave reviews over her role in Causeway, but to the Academy Award-winner, and when W asked if she was ever “starstruck,” Jennifer named the one star that would leave her speechless. “When Ariana Grande was in my last film, Don’t Look Up, I was photographed with her, and I fully look like a radio contest winner. I would be starstruck if I saw Jessica Simpson. That would knock me over.”
“She made a video for my birthday one time,” said Jennifer, with a gleam of pride. This kind of perspective has endeared Jennifer to her fans. She also told W magazine that 1991’s Father of The Bride (starring Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, and Kimberly Williams) always makes her cry. “Not when they get married, but when he sees her as a little girl, and she’s sitting at the table, and she’s like, ‘Mommy, Daddy, I met a man in Rome, and we’re getting married.’ But I’m so sensitive now that I can barely watch anything with children or animals.”
Jennifer got a chance to show that sensitivity in her new film, Causeway. In the A24/Apple Original Films feature, she plays Lynsey, “a military engineer who has returned to the U.S. from Afghanistan with a debilitating brain injury after an IED explosion,” per Deadline. “When she returns home to New Orleans, she has to face memories even more aching and formative than those she had in service: a reckoning with her childhood. She eventually connects with James (Brian Tyree Henry), and slowly they start to rely on each other for company and solace. James, it turns out, is also suppressing his own past trauma. Together, they learn about coming to terms and moving forward.”
Part of preparing for this role involved Jennifer and the cat connecting with real veterans to get their perspectives, thus better forming the characters on screen. “It was immensely helpful to meet incredible heroes who are in similar circumstances,” she said during a panel during Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event in December 2022. “And we had help with physical therapists who were in the movie and helped me on how to move. It was extremely informative, and most of all, we wanted to represent [soldiers] correctly.”