I’m still amused that Jennifer Lawrence is really doing this – she’s really waging the most high-profile Oscar campaign out of all the potential “Best Actress” nominees. Saoirse Ronan, Emma Stone, Margot Robbie – they’re all campaigning, for sure, but the way J-Law is going out there, you would think that she has the most acclaimed performance of the year for ‘mother!’ (hint: she does not). Anyway, Variety put J-Law with Adam Sandler for their “Actor on Actor” series, which they do in lieu of the more standard “actor roundtable” discussion. Sandler is getting buzz – ?? – for Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories. The section of their discussion which is getting the most attention is the part where they talk about fame, reading reviews, and all of that. (I’m including the full video at the end of the post.)

J-Law on whether she reads the reviews of her films: “Only when they’re good. No, I don’t. Normally, I promote a movie, you put the work in to promoting it, ask people to go see it, and then it’s just kind of out of your hands. I normally just kind of let it go. Dating the director was different, because we’d be on the tour together. I’d come back to the hotel, and the last thing I want to talk about or think about is a movie. He comes back from the tour, and that’s all he wants to talk about. I get it; it’s his baby. He wrote it; he conceived it; he directed it. I was doing double duty trying to be supportive partner while also being like, “Can I please, for the love of God, not think about ‘Mother!’ for one second.” And then he would start reading me reviews, and I finally was like, “It’s not healthy. I’m not going to do it, because if I read it, I start getting defensive.” Especially because it’s my man. I don’t want to sound in an interview that I’m defending what we’re doing in any way. It’s awesome, what we did. The people who hate it really hate it. But it’s nothing that needs to be defended. If I read a negative review, I just feel defensive.

J-Law on the negative critical response to ‘mother!’: “It’s so bizarre, because you’re so in the zone. You put your whole soul and body — you move to shoot a movie, you do all of this. You love it, obviously. You wouldn’t be there if you didn’t love it. And then people just destroy it. It sucks.

J-Law on Googling herself: “You know what I realized with Googling myself? I went on a little tangent a few days ago. Everybody was giving me compliments about [hosting for Jimmy] Kimmel. So I was like, this is a safe time to be bored and Google myself, right? And I was only reading positive things. I probably just Googled “I love Jennifer Lawrence.” It was all positive, and I got slammed with anxiety. It’s not healthy to realize how many people are actually looking and listening to you. That is such a mind f–k.

[From Variety]

This is being billed as our long-awaited answer to why Jennifer and Darren Aronofsky split: bad reviews, and his inability to stop reading reviews out loud. I think they probably broke up for many other reasons, but I’m sure that didn’t help, especially because so many critics were like “WTF is this movie?” As for the way Jen deals with reviews and criticism… she sounds very honest and self-aware. That’s her brand, obviously, but I really believe it in this situation, that she gets anxiety either way, good or bad, just because she doesn’t like to think about the scope of her fame.

Here’s the full video:

Embed from Getty Images

Photos courtesy of Getty, cover courtesy of Variety.