Jennifer Lawrence opened up about the experience of filming postpartum thriller Die My Love while five months pregnant with her second child.
Although the subject matter was tough to tackle as a mother herself, Lawrence, 34, admitted her “great hormones” allowed her to take on the character.
“A part of what she’s going through is the hormonal imbalance that comes with postpartum, but she’s also having an identity crisis. ‘Who am I as a mother? Who am I as a wife? Who am I as a sexual person to my husband? Who am I as a creative?’ And, I think, she’s plagued with this feeling that she’s disappearing,” Lawrence explained to reporters at a Cannes Film Festival press conference on Sunday, May 18. “For me, I was four-and-a-half, five months pregnant when we shot, I had great hormones, I was feeling great, which really was the only way I would be able to dip into some of this visceral emotion.”
The Lynne Ramsay film, which costars Robert Pattinson as Lawrence’s onscreen husband, debuted at the Cannes on Saturday, May 17, to solid reviews and a nine-minute standing ovation. It is based on author Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel of the same name, which follows a couple’s marriage as it’s thrown into disarray amid the wife’s mental health struggle.
“As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do. And it was just heartbreaking,” Lawrence told reporters of her character, who enters psychosis while battling postpartum depression. “I had just had my firstborn, and there’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating, which is so interesting. When Lynne moves this couple into Montana, she doesn’t have a community. She doesn’t have her people. But the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating, no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.”
Lawrence, who shares son Cy, 3, and a second baby, born this year, with husband Cooke Maroney, added that “having children changes everything. It changes your whole life. It’s brutal and incredible.”
“Not only do [my kids] go into every decision of if I’m working, where I’m working, when I’m working, they’ve taught me — I mean, I didn’t know that I could feel so much,” she said, “and my job has a lot to do with emotion. It’s almost like feeling a blister or something — like, so sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best and they’ve changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”
Lawrence has been open about how motherhood has changed her, telling Vogue in 2022, “The morning after I gave birth, I felt like my whole life had started over. Like, Now is day one of my life. I just stared. I was just so in love. I also fell in love with all babies everywhere. Newborns are just so amazing. They’re these pink, swollen, fragile little survivors. Now I love all babies. Now I hear a baby crying in a restaurant and I’m like, ‘Awwww, preciousssss.’”
Pattinson, 39, also recently became a parent after welcoming a daughter with fiancée Suki Waterhouse in March 2024. He admitted fatherhood has shifted his perspective on life and his career, as well.
“What Jennifer said, I’m here just to support,” he said at the Cannes press conference. “Ever since she was born, it’s reinvigorated the way I approach work and you’re a completely different person the next day.”
