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Jennifer Lawrence is opening up about life as a working mom and how motherhood made her realize how little society is set up to support parents.
“When I had my first child, I felt completely connected to my baby,” Lawrence, 35, told W Magazine in an interview published on Friday, November 7. “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.”
Lawrence stars in the new movie Die My Love alongside former Twilight actor Robert Pattison. The drama follows a woman who experiences a severe form of postpartum depression called postpartum psychosis, which can include severe and even life-threatening symptoms including paranoia, confusion, obsessive thoughts, hallucinations and attempts to harm either yourself or your baby.
Realizing just how little U.S. society is built to support new parents — the U.S. is the only industrialized world that does not mandate paid family leave, and to date does not offer universal childcare, universal free lunch, and pays mothers less than it does fathers — gave Lawrence a feeling of empathy towards her character, Grace.
“She says it in the movie: ‘There’s nothing wrong with me and my baby; it’s the world that’s f***ed up,” Lawrence told the publication in her Friday interview. “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.”
Lawrence is aware of the serious — and sometimes difficult to sit through — nature of her latest film. In fact, she is worried that fans of The Hunger Games or Twilight might be drawn to the movie for all the wrong reasons.
Jennifer Lawrence TheStewartofNY/FilmMagic
“My biggest fear is that people are expecting fanfic because it’s me and Rob,” Lawrence explained. “Huge mistake to go into this movie with that expectation. Everybody, pump your brakes and maybe watch a Lynne Ramsay movie before going in.”
In addition to relying on her own lived experience as a mother — Lawrence shares two children with her husband, Cooke Maroney — Lawrence also found inspiration for her character Grace in what many would consider to be an unlikely source: the TLC series Baylen Out Loud.
The series, which premiered in January 2025, follows Bayleen Dupree as she navigates life with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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 […]
“I’m usually watching that or Little Women,” the actress told the outlet, explaining that the show’s portrayal of the “visible cycle of buildup and release” that occur before and after a tic helped her in her role as a new mother struggling with postpartum psychosis.
“She’s terrified of being invisible,” Lawrence explained of her character, who throws herself through a glass window, destroys a bathroom, bashes her head against a mirror and strips down to her underwear while attending a child’s pool party. “She would rather her husband be mad at her than not see her.”
