With Jennifer Lawrence coming back into the spotlight with her new film Don’t Look Up and being very pregnant, I want to look into her fall from grace: the Jennifer Lawrence Pipeline for actors.
Jennifer Lawrence rose to fame for her role as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games in the early 2010s. She was doing lots of press and a lot of different interviews throughout then and around 2017. Her interviews consisted of her just being an honest and relatable actress. She seemed in tune with how “normal” people with a 9-to-5 operated and how young girls viewed stars like her. During this time, every star was something to aspire to, including impossible beauty standards. The role models were the size of models — super thin and tall. To see such a big star be comfortable being themselves was inspiring to teens. So, Jennifer blew up online for talking about how she liked food and enjoyed relaxing in her spare time. At this point, everyone loved her. She was busy and booked until her last big film, Mother!, in 2017.
Around 2016, people began to dislike the “persona” of being relatable and quirky. People don’t think it’s relevant and think she’s “cringey” for trying to be relatable, even though she’s been doing that the whole time. Lots and lots of hate and backlash for her press tours suddenly increased at the beginning of 2016, and it continued until she was no longer in the Hollywood spotlight. She realized this and came out saying that she thinks people have grown sick of her, so she left the entertainment biz for a long time, even though she was a highly paid and sought-after actress for many types of movies. This hiatus was about three years long after Mother! had come out in 2017, which also did not perform well in the box office, even though it had every reason to perform well. This gave her another reason to leave Hollywood for a bit.
Coincidentally, around 2017 is when Taylor Swift came out of her own hiatus for the same exact reason. She had felt that no one wanted to see her, so no one physically saw her for a year, just the same as Jennifer, and they both came back with their same down-to-earth personalities and dominated the entertainment world with their projects.
This “Jennifer Lawrence Pipeline” has its roots in misogyny and the impossible standards for not only Hollywood actresses but for any woman in the world. She has come back into the spotlight more ready than ever to take on acting again. Her recent interview shows her answering the question, “What have you been up to?” with a relatable, “Lots of sex!” since she’s now pregnant after having filmed the movie she’s promoting, Don’t Look Up. I feel many actresses are at risk of falling into this pipeline, not for the same reasons, but the same concept of relevancy where the public may turn against them because of such unrealistic standards for these women.