Her films have grossed more than $6 billion worldwide. She won the Academy Award for best actress at 22 (the second-youngest winner in that category) and holds the Guinness World Records title of highest-grossing action heroine in movie history. In May, she received a Peabody Award. Yet accolades make up only a fraction of who Jennifer Lawrence really is.
For W’s Art Issue, three masters of their craft—the American painter Elizabeth Peyton, the French multimedia artist Philippe Parreno, and the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans—conceive of Lawrence, 35, as a work of art unto herself. Painting, film, and photography are woven together into a three-part portfolio exploring the intersection of intimacy and image.
Seated at one of the many cafés on Manhattan’s West Side for our interview, Lawrence wore a red Charvet sweater, a white tee, and a pair of Still Here blue jeans. She became animated as she spoke about her collaborators for this issue. “It doesn’t really matter what you’re doing,” she said. “You just say yes to genius.”
The project’s production spanned three cities, over as many months. In Paris, Parreno cast Lawrence in a short film in which she plays a character who is—and isn’t—Jennifer Lawrence. The 37 pages of dialogue that Parreno provided felt “almost Ang Lee–like,” she said. It helped that the legendary Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji served as director of photography. “I called him Dr. Khondji, appropriately,” she said, grinning.
Dior cape, jeans, and belt; Longines watch; stylist’s own tank top.
Stills from a short film by Philippe Parreno with cinematography by Darius Khondji
The collaboration furthest from Lawrence’s typical repertoire was, perhaps, with Elizabeth Peyton. Lawrence sat for hours in the painter’s downtown Manhattan studio, chatting and drinking while Elvis played on repeat. “She’s so much smarter than me in every conceivable way,” Lawrence said. “She can have a snippet of wallpaper and think, Oh, yeah, this makes me feel like this. That’s so freeing. At the end of the day, what she does is completely different from me. I mean, I cannot draw.”
Lawrence’s artistic abilities are considerably less open to interpretation in Die My Love, a psychological drama that places her physicality front and center. Directed by the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay—whose previous excursions into the outer limits of mental health include We Need to Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher—the film stars Lawrence as Grace, a new mother and would-be author unraveling in psychosis. Her husband, Jackson, is played by the Twilight star Robert Pattinson, whom, it should be noted, Peyton depicted in vampiric white face paint in 2009, after the film became a global sensation.
“My biggest fear is that people are expecting fanfic because it’s me and Rob,” Lawrence said. She conjured an image of legions of YA fans misreading Die My Love—a film one critic described as “placing its hands on the sides of the viewer’s head, violently shaking them, forcing their eyes open like A Clockwork Orange”—as the kind of cinematic crossover event that would’ve sent Tumblr into meltdown circa 2012, when Lawrence starred in The Hunger Games. “Huge mistake to go into this movie with that expectation,” Lawrence playfully warned. “Everybody, pump your brakes and maybe watch a Lynne Ramsay movie before going in.”
Grace soon begins acting out with increasing disorder: hurling herself through a glass door, bashing her head against a mirror, stripping to her underwear at a children’s pool party, setting forest fires in the buff. “She’s terrified of being invisible,” Lawrence said. “She would rather her husband be mad at her than not see her.”
Lawrence’s corporeal characterization, often on all fours and wriggling through grass, evokes both Andrew Wyeth’s midcentury masterwork Christina’s World—depicting a young woman, vulnerable yet indomitable, crawling across a desolate field—and performance art in the tradition of body as both subject and medium.
In truth, audiences have watched Lawrence wrestle with anatomy and autonomy for decades. The Hunger Games franchise broke records even as Lawrence accumulated injuries across its productions: a wall-run bruise so severe during the making of the first film that it required a CT scan (her trainer worried her spleen had burst); a punctured eardrum and temporary deafness in one ear from underwater stunts for Catching Fire; and near suffocation from a fog-machine malfunction during Mockingjay – Part 1. On the set of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, she hyperventilated and dislocated a rib. During Don’t Look Up, shattered glass struck her eyelid.
Her pregnancy lent the film a dose of cinema verité. She understood, quite literally, how motherhood “takes any kind of veneer off, because now you’re seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes—somebody who’s so much more important than you are,” she said. Yet, to her surprise, those same instincts doubled as roadblocks. When Ramsay directed scenes that required Grace to wake her sleeping newborn out of boredom and other “things no parent would ever do,” Lawrence said, her body rebelled. Ramsay held firm, pushing her to dig deeper into Grace’s instability and confront, in real time, the unresolvable tension between maternal instincts and maternal madness that animates the movie. Just as you can “feel” a car chase with 4D seats, you become so intimate with Grace’s flickering disintegration that a strobe warning for the psyche might be warranted.
For Lawrence herself, Die My Love was what she called an “eight-dimensional ride”: reading the novel when her first baby was six weeks old, becoming pregnant with her second as the film was greenlighted, shooting while expecting, and then screening it postpartum. She’s still wrestling with “what I thought the movie was while I was doing it, versus viewing it afterward,” she said. “When I’m performing, it all has to be real and straightforward. Everything Grace does has to feel grounded.” But after giving birth, she changed her perspective. “Watching it back, I was like, Oh, maybe that was a fantasy. Maybe that was in her mind. I have different versions of how the whole movie could be interpreted now.”
It was Martin Scorsese, the movie’s producer, who urged her to take the role. Scorsese will also direct Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night, a psychological ghost story about adoption scheduled to begin production in January 2026. Eventually, she plans to direct. “But, you know, I’m also going to see my kids,” she said, adding with resignation, “at least for a couple minutes.”
The dark humor feels earned. “When I had my first child, I felt completely connected to my baby,” she said. “But I also realized the world wasn’t designed around that relationship. Suddenly, you’re like, Wait, how am I supposed to go back to work? Get in a car and drive away? Get on an airplane and fly away from my baby? Like, what are you talking about? Everything looks different after that.”
It’s a postpartum epiphany shared by her character Grace. “She says it in the movie: ‘There’s nothing wrong with me and my baby; it’s the world that’s fucked up,’ ” Lawrence said. “And I don’t know, maybe with a little more time, in retrospect, I’ll be able to tell the difference. I’m still not sure what was acting and what was just me being a mother.”
Philippe Parreno shoot: Style Director: Allia Alliata di Montereale. Hair by Cyndia Harvey at Art Partner; makeup by Lucia Pica at Art Partner; manicure by Ama Cauvas at Artlist. Sound design: Nicolas Becker; production: AP Studio, Inc.; executive producer: Marie Godeau; producer: Leeloo Turmeau; production manager: Charlotte Thizeau; first assistant camera: Vincent Toubel; second assistant camera: Alejandro Asensio; camera intern: Ulysse G. Castel; gaffer: Thierry Baucheron; spark: Jerôme Robin; key grip: Vincent Blasco; postproduction: Jenny Montgomery at Company 3; fashion assistant: Brice Costa; production coordinator: Gabrielle Lussier; unit manager: Jack Sciacca; production assistants: Alphonse Emery, Robinson Guillermet; hair assistant: Ronke Olaibi; makeup assistant: Vladimir Gueye; sound operator: Ondine Novarese; sound operator assistant: Lou Jullien; tailor: Alice Chastel.
