Jennifer Lawrence won't be shamed for 'empowering' onscreen nudity
A week after defending her decision to wear a revealing Versace dress during a photo call in frigid weather, Jennifer Lawrence is explaining why she agreed to certain nude scenes in her new film, Red Sparrow — which critics like Entertainment Weekly‘s Leah Greenblatt have called “pretty graphic and unnecessary.”
“I sort of felt a bit put off watching Lawrence using sex as a weapon, getting humiliated and beaten to a pulp, and letting it all hang out in scenes that felt fairly gratuitous,” added EW‘s Chris Nashawaty. “I have to say, the fourth or fifth time she’s forced to get buck naked, it begins to feel like the kind of cheesy, leering exploitation flick that would come with the tagline: Red Sparrow: The Only Thing Deadlier Than Her Mission Was Her Kiss.”
But the Oscar winner told 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker that she felt “empowered” by the film’s nudity, particularly after having experienced the hacking of her own intimate nudes in 2014.
“I realized that there was a difference between consent and not and I showed up for the first day and I did it and I felt empowered,” Lawrence said in the interview. “I feel like something that was taken from me I got back and am using in my art.”
By contrast, the actress called being hacked “so unbelievably violating” in a 2017 interview. Lawrence was one of several actresses whose personal images were disseminated online.
“I feel like I got gang-banged by the f***ing planet,” she said of the experience. “There’s not one person in the world that’s not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You could be at a barbecue and somebody could just pull it up on their phone, and that was just a really impossible thing to process.”
Still, she declined to pursue a lawsuit against the hackers.
“None of that was going to bring me peace,” she explained. “None of that was going to bring my nude body back to me and Nick [Hoult, her boyfriend at the time], the person they were intended for. It wasn’t going to bring any of that back. I wasn’t interested in suing everybody. I was interested in healing.”
Red Sparrow, then, may be part of that healing process — regardless what critics say.
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