It took seven people eight hours to dress
Jennifer Lawrence for her latest film role. “I just got tired thinking about it,” Lawrence says. “It was a long process.” In Friday’s “X-Men: First Class,” she plays Mystique, a mutant with blue skin. Her whole body had to be shaved, rubbed down with alcohol, coated with five layers of paint and topped with silicone scales. Lawrence’s skin blistered after her first day on set.
“I have scars,” she says, leaning forward and tugging at her blouse.
The fifth film in the franchise, “First Class” is a prequel to the primary X-Men trilogy and the spin-off movie “Wolverine,” which collectively grossed $1.5 billion worldwide. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, “First Class” charts the beginning of the saga: Mutant powers are being discovered and the conflict between Professor Xavier’s
WIREIMAGE
Jennifer Lawrence
X-Men and Magneto’s evil Brotherhood has yet to begin.
It’s the first time the Kentucky-born actress has worked on such a colossal production. She previously made indie films, and, at 20 years old, secured her status by receiving a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance as Ree — the fearless teenage daughter of an absent, meth-cooking father in “Winter’s Bone.”
Lawrence grew up in Louisville, the youngest of three and the only girl. She was a tomboy into her teens “because I didn’t have anybody to teach me how to put on makeup or wear a dress. I wanted to be a girl, I just didn’t know how.”
Her brothers are five and 10 years older than her; they called the shots at home. “I always understood I couldn’t ride in the front seat, choose what we watched on TV or pick which restaurants we went to,” she says.
Busy playing hockey, basketball and softball, and making something of an effort to be girly in the cheerleading squad at school, Lawrence had little time left for drama class. Her only acting experience was playing Desdemona in a five-minute sketch of “Othello” when she was 13.
A year later, during a summer trip to New York with her mother, a photographer stopped her on the street and asked to take her picture. She was later called by a talent agency and invited to audition for commercials.
After making a promo for MTV’s reality drama series “My Super Sweet 16,” in which she had to blow out candles on a birthday cake — “but a disco ball falls and I get cake sprayed on my face” — she was flown out to Los Angeles to do a screen test. At 14, she moved to New York with her mother and began auditioning.
Her parents were wary about their daughter pursuing a life in film, Lawrence says. “It was foreign to all of us, the idea of Hollywood and movies and acting. They were going to support me until I failed, and then they were going to bring me home. But fortunately I didn’t fail.”
In 2008, Lawrence starred with Charlize Theron and
Kim Basinger in “The Burning Plain,” playing the younger Theron. Written and directed by
Guillermo Arriaga (“Amores Perros,” “Babel”), the film received high praise but was little seen, so Lawrence remained relatively unknown until the success of “Winter’s Bone” last year.
But where “Winter’s Bone” was shot in 24 days on a budget of $2 million, “First Class” took 100-plus days with a budget of $120 million. What surprised Lawrence most was that someone was employed to write down a minute-by-minute analysis of her daily routine.
“One morning I came in and one of the [makeup] girls held up a finger, and she had an engagement ring on it,” Lawrence remembers. “We were jumping up and down, and then we were crying.” That day’s record ended up with the line: “Three minutes, 19 seconds — cries and shaved.”
“They gave me the piece of paper so I could frame it,” she says.
Lawrence wasn’t familiar with the other X-Men films when she auditioned for the part. “I am ashamed to say I auditioned three times before I even watched any of the movies,” she says. “And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been doing it all wrong. I was doing her all sweet and naive. I saw Rebecca
Romijn [who played Mystique in the X-Men trilogy] and she’s sultry and mean.”
Part of the reason Lawrence said yes to the project was because she knew the film’s leading men were to be
James McAvoy (Professor Xavier, played by
Patrick Stewart in the trilogy) and
Michael Fassbender (Magneto, played by Ian McKellen). But she dismisses the notion that she may have learned something from working with them: “It was mostly just fun. I don’t remember us working, I just remember us cracking up on set.”
Even if “First Class” was a lark, Lawrence is now consumed by her production schedule. She co-starred in two other films out this year, Mel Gibson’s dark comedy “The Beaver” and the long-distance-romance drama “Like Crazy,” winner of Sundance’s grand jury prize. And now she’s filming a project touted as the next “Twilight.” She’s the heroine in the adaptation of the science fiction novel “The Hunger Games,” due next year.
“As hard as it is and as tired as I am,” Lawrence says, “I force myself to get dinner once a week with my girlfriends, or have a sleepover. Otherwise my life is just work.”
Copyright Telegraph Media Group Ltd. 2011
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