Jennifer Lawrence Knows Exactly What She's Doing

Jennifer Lawrence walked into this episode and within ten minutes had explained the foundational rule of dressing tall, delivered a pitch-perfect Robert De Niro impression consisting of a single word, and offered to physically demonstrate the effects of two pregnancies on one’s chest. Amy Poehler, who has interviewed a lot of people, kept her hand on Lawrence’s knee for most of it. That detail tells you everything about the vibe: loose, warm, genuinely funny, and a little chaotic in the best way.

What makes this episode work is that Lawrence is not doing press. She is hanging out. There’s a difference. When she’s doing press, by her own account, things go sideways fast. She name-checks a headline, sort of appalled, sort of delighted: “Jennifer Lawrence calls Courtney Kardashian annoying.” She has a point. She gives good quote in the worst possible way for a publicist and the best possible way for everyone else. But here, without a specific film to sell and with a host who is genuinely her peer, she gets to just be the person her friends apparently know: hyper-organized, casually brilliant, constitutionally incapable of being mysterious.

I think I should do half than what normal people do. Cuz I see my quotes and they like they’re insane.

The Wild Beast from Louisville

The origin story gets an airing. Spring break in New York City, watching street dancing in Union Square, a talent scout named Daniel, a photograph that somehow ended up on a Joe Jonas t-shirt at a concert. Lawrence tells it with the practiced rhythm of someone who has told it many times but also with a genuine residue of bewilderment. She grew up watching Hilary Duff and doing impressions in the mirror. She saved $3,000 training horses and babysitting. She had a fever about New York that didn’t cool. The accident of discovery runs straight into the reality that she was, as her producing partner and best friend Justine Siracky put it before the conversation even started, “a wild beast” with “a lack of self-consciousness that was really unfamiliar to all of our friends.” That quality, Siracky says, she’s never outgrown. Watching Lawrence on this episode, that checks out.

Once I came back it was just like an impossible fever. It was just like I got to get back there I got to do what I got to you know.

On Acting, And Also Laundry

Lawrence talks about Die My Love, the Lynne Ramsay film in which she plays a woman unraveling, with real intelligence. She and Ramsay developed the character in conversation for years before a script existed. On set, the structure was loose, close to improv, and the way she tracked her character’s psychological descent was through costume: “At first she dresses really differently and sticks out. And then as she stays there, she starts to blend in with the community.” That’s a smart actor talking, the kind who knows that the work happens in specific, physical detail rather than in the feeling of feeling things. Poehler, who has watched Lawrence work at close enough range to know what she’s talking about, is genuinely reverent. It doesn’t feel like flattery.

The rest of the episode is less structured and much funnier. Lawrence would, without hesitation, take the laundry job on Below Deck. She’s a Leo who claims she’s basically Ken from the Barbie movie, which her friends use as a shorthand for when she asks something dumb. She sang the entirety of Shania Twain’s Any Man of Mine on key, prompting Poehler to go slightly unhinged with excitement. She wanted to do Bear Grylls while pregnant until her OB shut it down with a single text. She watches Alone and has strong opinions about caloric expenditure versus shelter quality. She is, in the word her childhood nickname gestures toward, Nitro.

I was surprised more people haven’t talked about how skinny I am in Die My Love because I’m pregnant. And I’ve been waiting and nobody said it. Nobody’s like, ‘Wow, you were pregnant? You look so skinny.’

Poehler has a theory about women who like horses having great hair. Lawrence agrees immediately and raises her with a friend who, on mushrooms, thinks Lawrence looks like My Little Pony. This is a podcast that is comfortable with itself. Nobody is doing a bit. The bit is just being who they are, which turns out to be more than enough.