There's no one more grounded, genuine and slightly loopy in Hollywood than the loveable Jennifer Lawrence - and her latest rant about dieting has us head over heels, writes Anna Hunter
Jennifer Lawrence is at it again. Being awesome. Being “outspoken”. Being herself. We’ve had the Oscars tumble, the Jack Nicholson love-in and almost every televised interview ever recorded. She’s witty, slightly insane and incredibly uninhibited in the most endearing, non-irritating manner and we’re now in awe of her no BS approach to body image. Don’t play Hunger Games with Jennifer; you won’t win. You will come off very badly indeed. Diets are going down.
In the November 2013 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK, Jennifer spoke candidly of the pressure put on her to lose weight and the short, sharp learning curve that ensued:
“I was young. It was just the kind of sh*t that actresses have to go through. Somebody told me I was fat, that I was going to get fired if I didn't lose a certain amount of weight. They brought in pictures of me where I was basically naked, and told me to use them as motivation for my diet. It was just that. [Someone brought it up recently.] They thought that because of the way my career had gone, it wouldn't still hurt me. That somehow, after I won an Oscar, I'm above it all. 'You really still care about that?' Yeah. I was a little girl. I was hurt. It doesn’t matter what accolades you get. I know it'll never happen to me again. If anybody even tries to whisper the word 'diet,' I'm like, 'You can go f*ck yourself.'"
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As usual Jennifer doesn’t mince her words, and it would take a brave (stupid) producer indeed to broach the issue of weight. Unfortunately this episode of weight-based bigotry is not an isolated incident for Ms Lawrence, as film critics bemoaned that she didn’t look “hungry enough” to play Katniss in The Hunger Games, with an especially sensitive New York Times journalist stating that her “seductive, womanly figure” was positively distracting. Boo hoo.
Jennifer is well aware of the ridiculousness of the situation, confessing: “In Hollywood, I’m obese. I’m considered a fat actress.”
If Jen is fat, we’re all elephants. Luckily, as previously expressed, she both proves and believes that celluloid career success does not directly correlate with skinniness, as she stressed in an interview with ELLE magazine last November:
“I’m never going to starve myself for a part […] I don't want little girls to be like, ‘Oh, I want to look like Katniss, so I'm going to skip dinner. That's something I was really conscious of during training… I was trying to get my body to look fit and strong - not thin and underfed."
Our very own GTG expert Dalton Wong helped Jennifer to become fighting fit for the role, and given his grounded approach and involvement in The Sunday Times Style magazine’s ‘Fit Not Thin’ campaign, we can scarcely think of a more like-minded pairing.
Not only is slimming down irresponsible according to Jennifer, it’s also impractical and ironically not at all conducive to doing any work:
“I do exercise! But I don’t diet. You can’t work when you’re hungry you know?”
Jennifer doesn’t even let a small gathering such as The Oscars get in the way of her appetite. Her first red carpet utterance was ‘Is there food here?’ We sincerely hope there was for the organisers’ sake. She may have won the Academy Award for Best Actress, but there will have been hell to pay if they’d skimped on the buffet.