“Please take a moment to mourn for Demi Moore”: Jennifer Lawrence Insulting Hollywood Legends and Calling Herself the First Action Female Lead Leaves the Fans Confused
There has been a backlash against Jennifer Lawrence for claiming she is Hollywood’s first female action star. The Hunger Games star is getting some flak for not quite getting it right regarding the history of female-led action movies, which she shared in a new interview. In an interview published by Variety on Wednesday, the Oscar winner spoke with fellow actress Viola Davis, who took part in the discussion, in which she mused the state of action movies that featured female leads in the past.
During Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Jennifer Lawrence revealed the one question everyone had when she was cast as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: “How much weight are you going to lose?” This movie would turn Lawrence into a worldwide superstar. The actress sought to clarify that controversial comment she made earlier this week in an interview about female-led action films on Thursday.
Jennifer Lawrence Called Herself First Action Female Lead; Fans Trolled Her
While discussing with Viola Davis in the interview, Jennifer Lawrence, 32, remarked that watching a movie that shows women can indeed play action lead roles makes her “so happy” every time. She was discussing her movie The Hunger Games at that time.
J Law said,
“I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work — because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”
“And it makes me so happy every time I see a movie that blows through every one of those beliefs and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies. To keep certain people in the same positions they’ve always been in.”
The Hunger Games offered Lawrence the rare opportunity to make an action movie with a female action hero. Many years later, Viola Davis had a similar opportunity with The Woman King.
Taking exception to the actress’s claims, fans on Twitter weighed in with their opinions.
A fan tweeted,
“Jennifer Lawrence claims no women were action movie stars before her is one of most absurd takes I’ve ever heard! Lmao 1979 we had Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN.
Another fan tweeted,
“Jennifer Lawrence says there were no female action heroes before she did “The Hunger Games” so please take a moment to mourn for Demi Moore who apparently never existed.”
A third person wrote,
“Jennifer Lawrence believes that she was the 1st female lead in an action movie. Sigourney Weaver was kicking a** in Alien 11 years before #JLaw was born.”
Several tweets were pointing out that Lawrence was not the first female action hero.
‘Female-Led Action Movies’: Jennifer Lawrence Clarifies Comment
The actress Jennifer Lawrence attempted to clarify her controversial comment about female-led action movies. The Hollywood Reporter reported on Thursday that Lawrence did not mean to imply that she was the “only woman who has ever led an action film” but rather to emphasize the feeling.
She said she wanted to dispel “old myths” about Hollywood’s gender bias that plague the film and television industry.
She continued,
“But it was my blunder, and it came out wrong. I had nerves talking to a living legend.”
Founder of The Black List, Hollywood’s annual survey of the most famous screenplays, Franklin Leonard called J Law’s comment “untrue” but also noted a “real bias against women-driven action movies.”
He said,
“It is untrue that no one had ever put a woman in an action movie before Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games,” Leonard tweeted. “It is absolutely true that Hollywood had and has a real bias against women-driven action movies because of this ridiculous belief about who identifies with whom.”
In nearly 45 minutes of an interview with Viola Davis, they discussed motherhood, Hollywood’s inequities, and their respective projects.
Source: Variety
