Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Travis M. Andrews.
When Jennifer Lawrence read the script for her latest film “Red Sparrow,” there was one thing standing in her way: Nudity.
It was a choice for her to film nude scenes in the movie, in which Lawrence plays a Russian ballerina attending a sort of spy school.
But it was not the first time the world would see her naked body. The first time was not her choice.
In 2014, hackers stole a trove of the actress’s private nude photographs and published them — along with the private photos of several other actresses — on the message board 4chan.
“When the hacking thing happened, it was so unbelievably violating that you can’t even put it into words,” Lawrence told the Hollywood Reporter. “… There’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process.”
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Until “Red Sparrow,” she had generally avoided taking roles that required sex or nude scenes. As she told W Magazine, “I’ve always been like, ‘Absolutely no way’ — especially after what happened — ‘no way am I ever gonna do anything sexual.’”
Lawrence’s discomfort around scenes featuring sex and nudity is well documented. Before filming her first real sex scene with Chris Pratt in the 2016 film “Passengers,” Lawrence has said she got “really, really drunk” to calm her nerves. She was uncomfortable because Pratt was married in real life. It wasn’t a great decision.
The drinking “led to more anxiety when I got home because I was like, ‘What have I done? I don’t know,’” she said at a roundtable discussion hosted by the Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “I knew it was my job, but I couldn’t tell my stomach that.”
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Being drunk for the entirety of “Red Sparrow” wasn’t an option. She had to come to terms with the nudity required of her for the role.
“The night before I didn’t sleep at all and I was obviously really nervous because it is the actual nightmare of standing in front of a classroom naked,” she told Today Australia.
It didn’t help that in one scene freezing water is poured on her bare skin.
“I was terrified. I don’t think I have ever been so scared of doing a movie before in my life. It was a lot of firsts for me,” she said. “Cool, so I’m really naked getting freezing cold water poured on me.”
Regardless of her fear, as she told Whitaker, “I showed up for the first day and I did it.”
She said that she “felt empowered” by filming the nude scenes, as if she’d regained part of herself.
“I feel like something that was taken from me I got back and am using in my art,” Lawrence said. “But I did feel like I took the power out of having my body taken from me. I felt like I took it back, and I could almost own it again.”
“Nudity by choice is a completely different thing from being violated,” she told Total Film. “This was my choice, and it was for my craft. It’s important to remember that there is a difference.”
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