Jennifer Lawrence on Her 'First Real Sex Scene' for a Movie
Jennifer Lawrence on Nov. 16 (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images)
Jennifer Lawrence skinned a squirrel for Winter’s Bone and did high kicks wearing blue body paint for X-Men: Days of Future Past. But none of that prepared Hollywood’s top actress for the pressure of her first big sex scene. In The Hollywood Reporter’s annual Actress Roundtable, Lawrence opened up about shooting a love scene with costar Chris Pratt for Passengers, Sony’s upcoming sci-fi drama.
“I had my first real sex scene a couple weeks ago [while shooting Passengers], and it was really bizarre,” she said. “Nobody did anything wrong. It’s just a bizarre experience.” So anxious did the 25-year-old actress feel about filming an erotic scene with Pratt, who is married to actress Anna Faris, that she needed some liquid courage.
“I got really, really drunk. But then that led to more anxiety when I got home because I was like, ‘What have I done? I don’t know,’” Lawrence told THR.
“And he was married. And it was going to be my first time kissing a married man, and guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach,” she continued. “And I knew it was my job, but I couldn’t tell my stomach that. So I called my mom, and I was like, ‘Will you just tell me it’s OK?’”
Related: Jennifer Lawrence’s Greatest Hits (and Trips) on the Red Carpet
Despite brief, steamy scenes in movies like Like Crazy (with Anton Yelchin) and Serena (with Bradley Cooper), Lawrence’s movie career has been surprisingly chaste so far. Her Hunger Games character Katniss, for example, has exchanged only a few pecks with love-triangle participants Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Filming with Pratt, then, was a whole new experience — and one that made Lawrence feel “very vulnerable.”
“You don’t know what’s too much,” she said. “You want to do it real, you want everything to be real, but then … That was the most vulnerable I’ve ever been.”
Lawrence, who stars in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (opening Friday), also told MTV that kissing Pratt felt very different from kissing co-stars Hutcherson and Hemsworth, mainly because she didn’t know him very well beforehand. “I don’t know him as well as I know Josh and Liam. It doesn’t feel as much like making out with a family member,” she said, adding jokingly, “Not that I’m against that — I’m from Kentucky.”
Passengers, directed by Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), is set on a spaceship in the future where thousands of passengers have been put into cryogenic sleep as they journey to another planet. When one of the ship’s occupants (Pratt) awakens 90 years early, he decides to rouse a female passenger (Lawrence) to keep him company. The film is scheduled for release in December 2016 and made news earlier this year when Lawrence and her reps negotiated a reported $20 million payday for the project.
Watch the 18 times Lawrence cracked us up at Comic-Con:
