Almost every collegiette seems to have a girl-crush on Jennifer Lawrence. She just seems like she’d be an awesome BFF. I have yet to see or read The Hunger Games series (please don’t be mad), and I still look up to Jennifer Lawrence.
I have always known who she was; her face was everywhere, on every ad and billboard across America, and people was constantly talking about her. But I didn’t give her a second thought until I saw an interview of her thoughts on Hollywood’s messed-up idea of beauty. That caught my attention.
Katniss was originally supposed to be thin, because she was, well, hungry in The Hunger Games series. The producers told Lawrence to lose weight for the role — and she simply refused. She wanted to provide a model for women and prove that being beautiful isn’t synonymous with being skinny.
“You look how you look. Be comfortable. What are you going to do, be hungry every single day to make other people happy? That’s just dumb,” Lawrence said in an interview.
She didn’t want anyone thinking, “I want to look like Katniss, so I’m going to stop eating.” Lawrence knew that losing weight to fit in to Hollywood’s idea of beauty would not be healthy for her or her audience.
She is unapologetically comfortable in her own skin, and that’s how all of us should be: happy to look the way we look without caring if society is happy with it, too.
These days, eating disorders are extremely common, and magazines seem to only use the “tall and skinny” body type. One thin model was labeled plus-size because she was a couple pounds heavier than the norm for models. Of course, by regular standards, she wasn’t plus-size at all. Society has warped our idea of what beauty is and made it an incredibly specific and difficult to obtain. That’s why JLaw is awesome. She acknowledges the twisted expectations and refuses to bow to pressure.
Now that’s the kind of hero we need.
She’s foul-mouthed, quirky, funny and doesn’t care what others think — and for that, we love her. Watching her Youtube interviews is hilarious, because she’s always saying something new and witty. At only 22 years old, she has already won a great deal of awards and will probably earn many more. It’s clear her healthy body image has helped, not hurt, her success in the entertainment industry.
“I’m obese in Hollywood,” she said. Jennifer Lawrence is anything but obese, but she would say no to a director asking her to lose a few pounds.
“We have the ability to control this image. Girls have seen enough of this body that we can’t imitate. (Katniss) is going to be their hero. So it’s kind of an amazing opportunity to get rid of that in this industry,” she said.
We should give her an Oscar just for that.