Jennifer Lawrence Said She’s The First Woman to Star in an Action Movie

In a new interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors feature conducted by Viola Davis, Jennifer Lawrence reflected on her leading role as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games film series. She told the fellow actor, “I remember when I was doing Hunger Games, nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work — because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead. And it just makes me so happy every single time I see a movie come out that just blows through every one of those beliefs, and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies. To keep certain people in the same positions that they’ve always been in.”

The Causeway actress added that playing the character “was an awesome responsibility. Those books were huge, and I knew that the audience was children. I remember the biggest conversation was ‘How much weight are you going to lose?’ Along with me being young and growing and not able to be on a diet, I don’t know if I want all of the girls who are going to dress up as Katniss to feel like they can’t because they’re not a certain weight. And I can’t let that seep into my brain either.”

Lawrence, 32, married and mother of a newborn son revealed that she could feel her “craft suffering” following the release of Hunger Games when she was 20. “I couldn’t really be an observer of life because everybody was observing me,” she told Davis. “And I didn’t know how to fix it.”

Twitter users took note of Lawrence’s comments about being the first female lead of an action movie, with many listing other great female actors before her. One person wrote, “It is untrue that no one had ever put a woman in an action movie before Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games. It is absolutely true that Hollywood had and has a real bias against women driven action movies because of this ridiculous belief about who identifies with whom.”

One person called Lawrence “a member of the Cult of Feminist Frequency,” adding photos of Linda Hamilton from Terminator 2, Sigourney Weaver from Alien, Angelina Jolie from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Milla Jovovich from The Fifth Element. Other folks added Pam Grier, Michelle Yeoh and Uma Thurman to the list of female action stars. Another person acknowledged Lawrence was wrong about female-led action movie, “but her main thesis is correct.” They called out other Twitter users criticizing her interview completely adding, “engage with that, maybe you’ll learn something.”