Jennifer Lawrence is a great many things, including an Oscar-winning actress, a Most Valuable Stars ascendant, and an unintentionally snotty kisser. But above all else, Jennifer Lawrence is the most relentlessly quotable A-list actress we’ve got, and with a Hunger Games sequel soon to premiere (and American Hustle looming at Christmas), she’s back out on the promo trail, and we have resurrected our Friday feature “This Week in Jennifer Lawrence Quotes” accordingly. (It’s okay if you just did a little celebratory dance in your chair, but make sure your body movement was good and dorky, as J. Law would have wanted.) This week, Lawrence hit up Facebook and Yahoo for a series of Internet-televised chats to promote The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and as ever, she was full of off-the-cuff punchlines and self-deprecating bon mots. Here’s what we’ve learned about J. Law this week.
She’s got a great response when asked whether Josh Hutcherson or Liam Hemsworth is the better kisser:
“How about we have them kiss each other and let them decide?”
No one treated her that differently after she won an Academy Award:
“If anything, it made me a target, because now when I flub my lines on set, Woody [Harrelson] is like, ‘Well, you’d better give that Oscar back!’”
Her first meeting with Catching Fire director Francis Lawrence was perhaps less than ideal:
“I apologized for being late because I just imagined our breakfast being at a completely different restaurant and didn’t double-check my schedule and just drove to a different restaurant. And then I spit egg in his mouth. Typical first meeting! I was talking with my mouth full and it was the first time I was meeting with my new boss and a piece of egg flew out of my mouth.”
She has fond memories of her childhood crush:
“Justin Timberlake. Nineties Justin Timberlake, though … like, ‘N Sync Justin Timberlake. I remember when I bought the ‘N Sync CD and I was listening to it and flipping through it — remember how CDs had the pullout picture things? — and I was getting so overwhelmed with hormones that I almost threw up.”
While on the set of Catching Fire with Josh Hutcherson and Sam Claflin, she feared that a poltergeist had slapped her ass:
“We’re all fighting these imaginary monkeys in this choreographed fight, and all of a sudden, in the middle of the scene, something just whipped my butt. Everyone said, ‘Nothing happened, it was probably just a charley horse.” I said, ‘I know what a charley horse is, and something slapped my butt!’ So we’re watching playback, we can’t find it, I’ve got a red mark on my butt, Josh is telling me it’s ancient spirits and I’m believing it. Then we slowed down [the playback] and we saw that the end of Sam’s trident had flown off and whacked me in the butt going 100 miles an hour.”
When it comes to good movie projects, she’s willing to share the wealth:
“Just recently, I read a script that had me sobbing. I’ve never been so moved by a story, and I thought it was so beautiful and amazing, and I just couldn’t wait for this script to get made so that the world could see it … but I just wasn’t her, I just wasn’t the character. And I also had an experience once where I read the script, and I loved it, but I couldn’t stop picturing Amanda Seyfried. So I e-mailed the people [behind the movie] and said, ‘You gotta hire Amanda Seyfried for this!’”
She was initially touched when new cast addition Jeffrey Wright gave her a nice-to-meet-you gift:
“Jeffrey Wright handed me a Tiffany’s box and I was like, ‘Oh my God, Jeffrey, you don’t have to do that! Tiffany’s?’ And I opened it, and just like a million crickets jumped out at me and I screamed and cried.”
Her hand-eye coordination has not improved since the first movie:
“My body and my brain have never connected … I feel like I belong on another planet with different gravity.”
If asked to play a different Hunger Games character, she’s not sure she could pull it off:
“I would like to be Effie, but I don’t think I could ever pull it off like [Elizabeth Banks]. My voice is too deep: ‘THAT’S MAHOGANY.’”
What would she be if she weren’t an actress?
“A hotel maid. Because I really like to clean and I like going through people’s stuff.”
She’s got good advice for a father whose daughter deals with bullying and body image:
“Well, screw those people. It’s something that everybody experiences. I experienced it in school before I was famous. The world has this certain idea that if you don’t look like an airbrushed, perfect model … you just have to look past it. You look how you look, so be comfortable. What are you going to do — be hungry every single day to make other people happy? That’s just dumb. Shows like Fashion Police and things like that are just showing these generations of young people to judge people based on all the wrong values and that it’s okay to point at people and call them ugly and call them fat. They call it fun and say, ‘Welcome to the real world,’ but that shouldn’t be the real world … There are unrealistic expectations for women. It’s disappointing that the media keeps it alive and fuels that fire. It’s something that really bothers me … because I love to eat.”
