Jennifer Lawrence Says She Was Treated By Producers In A Way We Would Now ‘Call Abusive’ In The Wake Of #MeToo

Jennifer Lawrence and Red Sparrow director Francis Lawrence sat down with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview airing Wednesday evening, ahead of the film’s release. In the film, Lawrence stars as a ballerina forced into a Russian espionage program that instructs students to use sex as a way to extract information. Lawrence previously said she felt “empowered” by the nude scenes in the film, as a way of taking back her sexuality following the photo hack in 2014 that exposed her nude photos to the internet.

Likewise, she told Amanpour: “I had… a lot of insecurities when it came to sexuality and nudity and my body and I’ve just been carrying them around for years,” adding that if she didn’t do the film, “it’s almost like all of these insecurities and fears win.”

It’s also difficult to talk about the film without drawing parallels to the current atmosphere in Hollywood, as Lawrence compared one scene where her character is ordered to strip naked along with several other women to an experience she had earlier in her career.

“I had a hard experience on a movie where basically the producers were trying to illustrate to me that I was overweight, but I wasn’t, and a part of that was having me do a lineup with women that were much, much thinner than I was. And we had pieces covering our private parts but were essentially naked. And I was told to use the photos as motivation for my diet. So it was dehumanizing in a different way. It was more mentally brutal.”

Noting that the producer in question was also a woman, Amanpour asked Lawrence if she considered herself to be part of the #MeToo movement.

“When I hear the harrowing stories of the victims of Harvey Weinstein, I don’t feel right putting myself in that exact category. I was certainly mistreated, I was treated in a way that I think now we would call abusive. I mean being young and I had to deal with executives or higher ups putting their hands on my legs and not feeling like I could say, ‘please don’t do that,’ but um, no, I don’t know. I don’t know?”

In a much more breezy interview with Stephen Colbert earlier this week, Lawrence called Weinstein a “horrible ass boil that will not go away.” “Even when you pop him, he just will not go away,” she quipped.

(Via CNN)