Like your standard Jennifer Lawrence character, Jennifer Lawrence has gotten as far as she has in life as an outsider without a traditional education. In an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Lawrence discussed her decision to drop out of school at age 14 in order to pursue acting full time. She says she “never felt very smart,” but that when she started to read scripts, she realized she could intuit a lot about a character from them. “I know exactly what it would look like if somebody felt that way. That was a whole part of my brain that I didn’t even know existed,” she said. “And I didn’t want to let it go.”
That meant dropping out of school and not looking back. “I dropped out of middle school. I don’t technically have a GED or a diploma. I am self-educated,” she said. “I wanted to forge my own path. I found what I wanted to do and I didn’t want anything getting in the way of it … even friends, for many years, were not as important to me as my career.” Luckily sticking by her guns has allowed Lawrence the ability to make fun of lame people who stayed in school, like Darren Aronofsky.
