We may never get a Black Widow movie, but Jennifer Lawrence as a Russian-speaking super-spy in Red Sparrow is a pretty good backup plan.
In her first role since not bracing the sink in mother!, the four-time Oscar nominee plays Dominika Egorova, a ballerina-turned-recruit for Sparrow School, a “secret intelligence service that trains exceptional young people like her to use their bodies and minds as weapons,” according to the official premise. “After enduring the sadistic training process, she emerges as the most dangerous Sparrow the program has ever produced. Dominika must now reconcile the person she was with the power she now commands, with her own life and everyone she cares about at risk, including an American CIA agent who tries to convince her he is the only person she can trust.”
Lawrence took the role in Red Sparrow for two reasons (three, if you want to assume she’s a fan of Keri Russell in The Americans): to work with her The Hunger Games: Mockingjay director Francis Lawrence again, and because she wanted to reclaim her sexuality after the 2014 nude photo leak. “[The film] was really sexual, which has always scared me,” she explained. “I’ve always been like, ‘Absolutely no way’ — especially after what happened — ‘no way am I ever gonna do anything sexual.’ So, for me, doing Red Sparrow, I felt like I was getting something back that had been taken from me.”
Red Sparrow, which also stars Joel Edgerton, opens March 2.
