Jennifer Lawrence was once in a relationship with the director of a movie she was acting in, and she admitted she didn't understand it.
The Oscar-winning actress, best known for her roles in The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook, got brutally honest about her experience working on the 2017 horror flick Mother! — a movie so confusing, even she didn’t fully get it.
Appearing on Watch What Happens Live, Lawrence was grilled by host Andy Cohen: “On a scale of one to totally confused, how much did you understand your film Mother!?”
Without missing a beat, Lawrence laughed and dropped a jaw-dropping confession: “I’m going to be honest. Well, I was sleeping with the director, so I had the CliffNotes. So, five. Or four?”
Cohen, clearly stunned, responded: “Four?! Wow okay, that's not high.”
Lawrence took the moment to offer some tongue-in-cheek advice: “But if anybody needs any tips on understanding their films, you know what to do!”
When Cohen fired back with: “F*** the director?,” she doubled down: “Yeah!”
Lawrence’s relationship with Darren Aronofsky, who wrote and directed Mother!, was as high-profile as the film itself. But behind the scenes, the dynamic wasn’t as glamorous as fans might think.
In a conversation with Adam Sandler for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Lawrence opened up about the reality of dating the man directing her.
“I normally just kind of let it go,” she said, referring to how she usually promotes a film. “Dating the director was different. We’d be on the [press] 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 and I get it. It’s his baby. He wrote it. He conceived it. He directed it.
“I was doing double duty trying to be a supportive partner, while also being like, ‘Can I please, for the love of God, not think about Mother! for one second?’”
The constant post-tour film analysis eventually took its toll.
“I finally was just like, ‘It’s not healthy. Neither of us are doing it because if I read it, I start getting defensive.’ Especially because it’s my man,” Lawrence said.
She added: “It’s awesome, what we did — some people hate it and the people who hate it, really hate it. But it’s nothing that needs to be defended and if I read a negative review, I just feel defensive.”
Mother! may have had an A-list cast — including Javier Bardem, Domhnall Gleeson, Michelle Wiig, and Brian Gleeson — but it left audiences scratching their heads.
Despite scoring a decent 68% on Rotten Tomatoes, many viewers found the film too disturbing and difficult to follow. And according to Lawrence, they weren’t alone.
Aronofsky himself once explained that the confusion was intentional: he “wanted a make a punk movie and come at you.”
Lawrence and Aronofsky met on the set of the film but split just two months after its release. She has since moved on and is now married to Cooke Maroney