During a conversation with actress and producer Viola Davis for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Jennifer Lawrence reminisced about her work on The Hunger Games. Particularly, the actress recalled being asked to lose weight for her portrayal of the heroine Katniss Everdeen. Lawrence starred in the franchise’s films, based on the novels by Suzanne Collins, from 2012-2015. Lawrence, who has discussed the request for weight loss before, told Davis:

Lawrence’s career flourished after her Oscar-nominated performance in the 2010 mystery Winter’s Bone. She went on to be cast as Mystique in the X-Men film series and as Katniss, where she became the highest-grossing action heroine of all time.

“In Hunger Games, it was an awesome responsibility. Those books were huge, and I knew that the audience was children. I remember the biggest conversation was ‘How much weight are you going to lose?’ Along with me being young and growing and not able to be on a diet, I don’t know if I want all of the girls who are going to dress up as Katniss to feel like they can’t because they’re not a certain weight. And I can’t let that seep into my brain either.”

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Lawrence is not the only actress to recently open up about weight being a focus of conversation in Hollywood. Bryce Dallas Howard told Metro earlier this year that studio executives wanted her to lose weight for Jurassic World. That was shut down, as film director Colin Trevorrow came to her defense.

Jennifer Lawrence’s Return to the Big Screen

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With Don’t Look Up, Lawrence returned to work following a two-year hiatus after 2019’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix. In the same interview with Metro, Lawrence said that before the break, she was choosing to participate in films that weren’t aligned with her “creativity” and “imagination.” During her conversation with Davis, she seemed to expand on that comment:

Lawrence most recently starred in Causeway, a psychological drama about an American soldier who returns home from a tour in Afghanistan following a traumatic brain injury. Causeway co-stars Brian Tyree Henry and has received mostly positive critical reviews. Lawrence will next appear in No Hard Feelings. The comedy, which also stars Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Natalie Morales, and Matthew Broderick, is currently in production and slated for a 2023 release.

“I’ve been doing this since I was so young. When Hunger Games was out, I couldn’t really be an observer of life because everybody was observing me. I could feel my craft suffering. And I didn’t know how to fix it. I was scrambling, trying to fix it by saying yes to this movie and then trying to counteract it with that movie. And not realizing that what I had to do was no movies until something spoke to me. When I read “Causeway,” I had no confidence in myself — I had no confidence in my antenna. I had lost so much of what I used to feel was instinctual. And the problem with instincts is it’s not a method you can fall back on.”