We don’t have a lot of movie stars left. Reliable figures of 1990s cinema like Leonardo DiCaprio and Sandra Bullock still command attention whenever they headline a new movie, but among our modern crop of leading actors, it’s hard to find many that stand out as true blue movie stars. The current cinematic landscape leaning more on brand IP than anything else has removed opportunities for fresh faces to establish themselves as the reason people go to see a movie. Plus, the presence of social media has removed some of the mystique that used to be so critical to vintage movie stars.
However, if there’s any exception to this phenomenon among more recent lead actors, it has to be Jennifer Lawrence. The star of everything from The Hunger Games to No Hard Feelings, Lawrence is the rare deal for lead actors under 35; somebody that nearly everyone on the planet knows and whose presence in a project tends to immediately get people’s attention. It’s a strange phenomenon considering similar folks in her age range like Tom Holland or Nicholas Hoult haven’t been able to establish that kind of reputation. However, for a variety of reasons, Jennifer Lawrence has managed to stick around as one of our last great Hollywood stars.
Jennifer Lawrence’s status as one of the last Hollywood movie stars out there is of course greatly attributed to her acting talents, but it also has to do with timing. This isn’t a comment on Lawrence being “a hack” but rather a reflection on how the film industry changed in the 2010s. Lawrence was able to benefit from Hollywood’s love for ongoing serialized franchises in the 2010s, thanks to expansive narratives like The Hunger Games and the X-Men films that spun out of X-Men: First Class. However, she also managed to establish herself as a bankable name in the last few years Hollywood was regularly producing mid-budget original films aimed at grown-ups, which are also the kind of features that tend to solidify movie stars.
If Lawrence had arrived on the scene even three years later, who knows if she would’ve secured the delicate mixture of big-budget tentpoles and mid-budget grown-up fare that solidified her status as a movie star in the early 2010s. What is clear, though, is that Lawrence arrived at the right place and at the right time. Just before Hollywood turned off the lights on making theatrical mid-budget dramas regularly, Lawrence got in just under the wire to take part in the genre’s sunset days. Thanks to this, she got the benefit of the kind of award season and audience approval that used to be way more normal for mainstream movie stars.
In that same era where Lawrence was juggling both Katniss Everdeen and David O. Russell roles, this performer was also reinforcing her movie star chops by demonstrating a willingness to do anything and everything. Even before she did her big blockbuster movies, Lawrence’s first two big indie movies, Winter’s Bone and The Beaver, saw her inhabiting wildly different characters in extremely different atmospheres. Once she leaped into the mainstream cinema scene, Lawrence continued to embrace versatility. She could be a hero for young kids everywhere in the Hunger Games movies while playing an antagonistic figure in American Hustle without missing a beat.
Even in her most recent years as an actor, Lawrence is continuing to juggle roles that are far from rehashes of one another. In the span of seven months, from November 2022 to June 2023, Lawrence anchored and excelled in the dark grounded drama Causeway and then the R-rated yukfest No Hard Feelings. That’s the kind of range that echoes other rare modern movie stars like Channing Tatum or Sandra Bullock. Much like those two actors, Lawrence has demonstrated a welcome yearning to give audiences the unexpected and never get pigeonholed in just one place for too long. That’s the kind of risk-taking that keeps somebody a movie star long after their big franchise has ended.
It’s also a testament to Jennifer Lawrence’s star power that even her misfires as a leading lady don’t seem to impact her career very much. The 2017 Darren Aronofsky feature mother!, for instance, was reviled by audiences, but it now seems to have largely been swept under the rug. Meanwhile, nobody even remembers the wildly misguided and dreary spy movie pastiche Red Sparrow. Even her 2012 horror misfire The House at the End of the Street, which arrived super early in her acting career, did nothing to slow down her momentum. Some movie stars, like Adam Sandler, get their big screen appeal tarnished by showing up in one too many bad movies. For Jennifer Lawrence, though, subpar star vehicles just seemed to get drowned out by positive memories of her most accomplished works.
Of course, movie stars aren’t just made by the movies they headline. Since the earliest days of cinema, the larger external life of actors beyond their work on the silver screen tends to inform whether or not they’ll stick around long-term as movie stars. Jennifer Lawrence solidified her status as a memorable performer thanks to her upfront candor and down-to-Earth interests in her press persona. For some, her repeated insistence on her love for pizza may have come across as too “quirky” or just a calculated way to seem “humble” to the general public. However, her eschewing of traditional movie star polish did her a lot of good and gave her a unique persona among modern movie stars.
Really, there’s no shortage of reasons that Jennifer Lawrence continues to stick around as a notable movie star, including the simple fact that we just don’t have a lot of them anymore. The cinematic landscape is a complicated domain in the modern world, and it’s not one that leaves a lot of room for classical movie stars. We’ve got to treasure the ones we have, like Jennifer Lawrence. Even if modern movie stars were abundant, though, the versatility and off-screen personality of Jennifer Lawrence is something that can’t be replicated, and something we just can’t get enough of.
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