Jennifer Lawrence on Motherhood and the Blurred Line Between Performance and Reality
For W’s Art Issue, Lawrence worked with three masters—Elizabeth Peyton, Philippe Parreno, and Wolfgang Tillmans—on an intimate study of what it means to be seen.
Her films have grossed more than $6 billion worldwide. She won the Academy Award for best actress at 22 (the second-youngest winner in that category) and holds the Guinness World Records title of highest-grossing action heroine in movie history. In May, she received a Peabody Award. Yet accolades make up only a fraction of who Jennifer Lawrence really is.
For W’s Art Issue, three masters of their craft—the American painter Elizabeth Peyton, the French multimedia artist Philippe Parreno, and the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans—conceive of Lawrence, 35, as a work of art unto herself. Painting, film, and photography are woven together into a three-part portfolio exploring the intersection of intimacy and image.
Seated at one of the many cafés on Manhattan’s West Side for our interview, Lawrence wore a red Charvet sweater, a white tee, and a pair of Still Here blue jeans. She became animated as she spoke about her collaborators for this issue. “It doesn’t really matter what you’re doing,” she said. “You just say yes to genius.”
The project’s production spanned three cities, over as many months. In Paris, Parreno cast Lawrence in a short film in which she plays a character who is—and isn’t—Jennifer Lawrence. The 37 pages of dialogue that Parreno provided felt “almost Ang Lee–like,” she said. It helped that the legendary Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji served as director of photography. “I called him Dr. Khondji, appropriately,” she said, grinning.
Dior cape, jeans, and belt; Longines watch; stylist’s own tank top.
Tillmans, whose unglamorized imagery earned him a Turner Prize, photographed Lawrence at both his London home and his former studio in London’s East End, now a gallery run by the famed art dealer Maureen Paley. The shoot was surprisingly intimate and spontaneous, even for Tillmans. “I had this idea to put a T-shirt on her from my 2025 Centre Pompidou exhibition. It reads: Nothing could have prepared us / Everything could have prepared us,” he said. “Then I took her out to this roof area where I had the fondest memories of parties. The intimacy of our house beforehand, that old location where I used to throw parties on the roof, the T-shirt from an exhibition—all that was well prepared, but not planned as to what exactly would happen. And she was totally game. It was amazing to be able to ask her, ‘Could you just dial in 5 percent of friendliness, a tiny hint of a smile?’ And I could see in front of my eyes how it really would be dialed in 5 percent—she was so in control of her expressions. It’s a privilege to be one-on-one with someone you feel is of great talent.”
T-shirt by Wolfgang Tillmans for Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Row long-sleeve top.
Dior men’s shirt.
The collaboration furthest from Lawrence’s typical repertoire was, perhaps, with Elizabeth Peyton. Lawrence sat for hours in the painter’s downtown Manhattan studio, chatting and drinking while Elvis played on repeat. “She’s so much smarter than me in every conceivable way,” Lawrence said. “She can have a snippet of wallpaper and think, Oh, yeah, this makes me feel like this. That’s so freeing. At the end of the day, what she does is completely different from me. I mean, I cannot draw.”
Dior men’s shirt and men’s jeans.
Lawrence paused and then reconsidered: “Well, the only thing I can draw is a horse head profile.” I slid my notebook across the table. “And I will draw,” she declared, before sketching a crude equine form with the charming, elementary proficiency of someone who’s reproduced the same image hundreds of times. “I learned it from my older cousin when I was 5 or 6,” she explained. “I actually ended up tattooing this on my friend’s body once.” She signed the doodle with mock solemnity.
Lawrence’s artistic abilities are considerably less open to interpretation in Die My Love, a psychological drama that places her physicality front and center. Directed by the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay—whose previous excursions into the outer limits of mental health include We Need to Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher—the film stars Lawrence as Grace, a new mother and would-be author unraveling in psychosis. Her husband, Jackson, is played by the Twilight star Robert Pattinson, whom, it should be noted, Peyton depicted in vampiric white face paint in 2009, after the film became a global sensation.
“My biggest fear is that people are expecting fanfic because it’s me and Rob,” Lawrence said. She conjured an image of legions of YA fans misreading Die My Love—a film one critic described as “placing its hands on the sides of the viewer’s head, violently shaking them, forcing their eyes open like A Clockwork Orange”—as the kind of cinematic crossover event that would’ve sent Tumblr into meltdown circa 2012, when Lawrence starred in The Hunger Games. “Huge mistake to go into this movie with that expectation,” Lawrence playfully warned. “Everybody, pump your brakes and maybe watch a Lynne Ramsay movie before going in.”
Dior coat and shoes.
Adapted from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love portrays a shattered emotional landscape. Grace’s selfhood unravels slowly at first, as she mumbles, snaps at people, and wields a fly swatter like a medieval bludgeon. Lawrence said one source of inspiration for her portrayal was the TLC series Baylen Out Loud, which follows a young woman who’s living with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. (“I’m usually watching that or Little Women.”) She studied the show’s honest portrayal of the mounting tension before a tic, the irresistible urge to act, and the relief that follows—“the visible cycle of buildup and release,” she said.
Grace soon begins acting out with increasing disorder: hurling herself through a glass door, bashing her head against a mirror, stripping to her underwear at a children’s pool party, setting forest fires in the buff. “She’s terrified of being invisible,” Lawrence said. “She would rather her husband be mad at her than not see her.”
Dior cape.
At one point, Grace destroys a bathroom in a frenzy of primal fury. On location at a desolate house flanked by the Canadian Rocky Mountains, Lawrence ripped a sink off the wall and clawed down the wallpaper until her fingertips left streaks of blood. “We had only one take, because you can’t un-destroy a destroyed bathroom,” she said. “That was adrenaline-inducing in itself.” Alone in the tiny space with a single camera operator, she didn’t know what she’d do until she was in the moment. “The emotional ‘calling up’ was almost like physical exercise,” she said. The cameraman left with glass in his knee.
Lawrence’s corporeal characterization, often on all fours and wriggling through grass, evokes both Andrew Wyeth’s midcentury masterwork Christina’s World—depicting a young woman, vulnerable yet indomitable, crawling across a desolate field—and performance art in the tradition of body as both subject and medium.
In truth, audiences have watched Lawrence wrestle with anatomy and autonomy for decades. The Hunger Games franchise broke records even as Lawrence accumulated injuries across its productions: a wall-run bruise so severe during the making of the first film that it required a CT scan (her trainer worried her spleen had burst); a punctured eardrum and temporary deafness in one ear from underwater stunts for Catching Fire; and near suffocation from a fog-machine malfunction during Mockingjay – Part 1. On the set of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, she hyperventilated and dislocated a rib. During Don’t Look Up, shattered glass struck her eyelid.
Olly Shinder jacket.
Lawrence was deliberate for Die My Love, on- and off-screen, by timing her pregnancy to align with production. “I knew I was going to be doing the movie, and I also knew that I needed a second child before my other son got too old,” she said. Being in the second trimester was the sweet spot for shooting, she explained, because typically “in the first trimester, you’re very sick; and in the second trimester, you start to feel better.” (“Real sexy family planning,” she quipped.)
Her pregnancy lent the film a dose of cinema verité. She understood, quite literally, how motherhood “takes any kind of veneer off, because now you’re seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes—somebody who’s so much more important than you are,” she said. Yet, to her surprise, those same instincts doubled as roadblocks. When Ramsay directed scenes that required Grace to wake her sleeping newborn out of boredom and other “things no parent would ever do,” Lawrence said, her body rebelled. Ramsay held firm, pushing her to dig deeper into Grace’s instability and confront, in real time, the unresolvable tension between maternal instincts and maternal madness that animates the movie. Just as you can “feel” a car chase with 4D seats, you become so intimate with Grace’s flickering disintegration that a strobe warning for the psyche might be warranted.
Dior cape, jeans, and belt; Longines watch; stylist’s own tank top.
For Lawrence herself, Die My Love was what she called an “eight-dimensional ride”: reading the novel when her first baby was six weeks old, becoming pregnant with her second as the film was greenlighted, shooting while expecting, and then screening it postpartum. She’s still wrestling with “what I thought the movie was while I was doing it, versus viewing it afterward,” she said. “When I’m performing, it all has to be real and straightforward. Everything Grace does has to feel grounded.” But after giving birth, she changed her perspective. “Watching it back, I was like, Oh, maybe that was a fantasy. Maybe that was in her mind. I have different versions of how the whole movie could be interpreted now.”
The Row top, sweater, and shorts.
It was Martin Scorsese, the movie’s producer, who urged her to take the role. Scorsese will also direct Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night, a psychological ghost story about adoption scheduled to begin production in January 2026. Eventually, she plans to direct. “But, you know, I’m also going to see my kids,” she said, adding with resignation, “at least for a couple minutes.”
The dark humor feels earned. “When I had my first child, I felt completely connected to my baby,” she said. “But I also realized the world wasn’t designed around that relationship. Suddenly, you’re like, Wait, how am I supposed to go back to work? Get in a car and drive away? Get on an airplane and fly away from my baby? Like, what are you talking about? Everything looks different after that.”
It’s a postpartum epiphany shared by her character Grace. “She says it in the movie: ‘There’s nothing wrong with me and my baby; it’s the world that’s fucked up,’ ” Lawrence said. “And I don’t know, maybe with a little more time, in retrospect, I’ll be able to tell the difference. I’m still not sure what was acting and what was just me being a mother.”
Still from Jennifer Lawrence’s short film by Philippe Parreno.
Wolfgang Tillmans shoot: Style Director: Allia Alliata di Montereale. Wolfgang Tillmans’s creative team: Olly Shinder, Simon Nicholas Gray. Hair by Gregory Russell at the Wall Group; makeup by Georgie Eisdell at the Wall Group; manicure by Kate Williamson for Dior Vernis at A-Frame Agency.
Philippe Parreno shoot: Style Director: Allia Alliata di Montereale. Hair by Cyndia Harvey at Art Partner; makeup by Lucia Pica at Art Partner; manicure by Ama Cauvas at Artlist. Sound design: Nicolas Becker; production: AP Studio, Inc.; executive producer: Marie Godeau; producer: Leeloo Turmeau; production manager: Charlotte Thizeau; first assistant camera: Vincent Toubel; second assistant camera: Alejandro Asensio; camera intern: Ulysse G. Castel; gaffer: Thierry Baucheron; spark: Jerôme Robin; key grip: Vincent Blasco; postproduction: Jenny Montgomery at Company 3; fashion assistant: Brice Costa; production coordinator: Gabrielle Lussier; unit manager: Jack Sciacca; production assistants: Alphonse Emery, Robinson Guillermet; hair assistant: Ronke Olaibi; makeup assistant: Vladimir Gueye; sound operator: Ondine Novarese; sound operator assistant: Lou Jullien; tailor: Alice Chastel.
