Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t have any hard feelings about getting rejected for a Twilight role.
While appearing on a recent episode of The Rewatchables, the actress, 32, told host Bill Simmons about her experience auditioning for the 2008 film.
“I auditioned for Twilight,” she said. “They turned me down immediately. I didn’t even get a callback, but my life would have been totally different.”
While Twilight did not work out, The Hunger Games did. Lawrence was cast as Katniss Everdeen a year after her Twilight audition. That role, plus her Oscar nomination for the 2010 drama Winter’s Bone, helped make her an overnight star.
Although the Kentucky native ended up carrying a bow-and-arrow instead of falling in love with a vampire, she believes her career would not have turned out that differently if she was cast in Twilight. When she made four Hunger Games movies between 2012 and 2015, she also starred in several other projects to make sure she wasn’t known exclusively for playing Katniss. She would have done the same if she starred in Twilight.
“I have to churn out movies in between so that I’m not only known for this franchise,” Lawrence told Simmons, 53. “I was still in a franchise, so I was still trying to counteract the franchise-ness and I would still be doing that if I was in Twilight.”
The mother of one later explained that she almost did not star in The Hunger Games because she saw the fandom that surrounded Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.
“That was just something I never had in mind,” Lawrence said of that “Twilight-level” fame. “I want to do Indies and I wanted to do good films, but I didn’t want to be the most famous person on the planet. That’s a very different life than what I had pictured for myself.”
While Lawrence did not seem to mind getting The Hunger Games instead of Twilight, she was “devastated” to miss being cast in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. The role went to Mia Wasikowska instead.
“The one thing that really killed me, the only time I’ve ever been truly devastated by losing an audition — because most of the time you’re like, ‘Eh, wasn’t meant to be, move on, what can you do?’ — was Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland,” Lawrence told Howard Stern in 2018. “That one devastated me.”
The Oscar winner’s approach to fame has also changed. She recently told Interview Magazine her feelings about paparazzi have evolved since welcoming her son, Cy, 16 months.
“I was so nervous when I was pregnant. I was getting paparazzi’d, and I was just like, ‘How the f— am I not going to lose it on these guys when they’re taking a picture of my baby?’ ” Lawrence said in a conversation with Cameron Diaz. “Then once he was here, I realized that my energy is more important to him than anything else. So if he feels that I’m anxious before I leave the house, or I’m angry when we’re outside, that’s going to impact him.”
She is now “more zen and a little bit more relaxed with getting photographed because I don’t have a choice,” adding, “You just have to accept it, take a deep breath and walk. I don’t want him to inherit the anxiety and anger that I have.”
Lawrence’s new movie, No Hard Feelings, is currently in theaters. The next installment in the Hunger Games franchise, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, hits theaters on Nov. 17. Viola Davis, Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman, and Hunter Schafer star in the movie, which is set before Katniss competed in the games.
[via]
