Jennifer Lawrence did some serious method acting to get in character for the new comedy Don’t Look Up. At a Q&A event with fans this week, Lawrence said that she used cannabis on set to get into the mind of her character – a habitual stoner – according to a report by Indie Wire. Thankfully, the movie was filmed in Boston, Massachusetts, where recreational marijuana use is legal.
Don’t Look Up is a Netflix original film starring Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Cate Blanchett, Himesh Patel, Matthew Perry and Chris Evans, among others. Co-written and directed by Adam McKay, it tells the story of two relatively low-level astronomers who are the first to discover that a comet is on a collision course with earth. Lawrence’s character, Dr. Kate Dibiasky, uses cannabis to cope, and Lawrence admitted that she gave it a try herself.
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“I know what you’re going to say, and I wasn’t pregnant [at the time],” the 31-year-old actress assured listeners. Lawrence and her husband Cooke Maroney confirmed that they are expecting their first child together in September, long after filming had wrapped.
“You were not pregnant,” McKay confirmed at the Q&A, reflecting: “can I say this?” Lawrence answered: “I think so, just nobody tell my mother-in-law.”
Lawrence explained in more specific detail that she had asked for permission to smoke real cannabis on set specifically during one scene with Streep where there was no scripted dialogue, “because my character was getting high in the movie.”
“So Jen was like, ‘are you gonna throw me some improv?’ Which we always do,” McKay went on. “And I was like, ‘no, you can get high.’ I just kept turning to my script supervisor, Cate Hardman, and was like, ‘I just want to say, hey, Jen. I think I have a monologue idea for you.’ And I would look at Jen and was like, ‘I can’t do it. It would be too mean.’ So I left you alone.”
Laughing, Lawrence said that not everyone was so considerate of her state. She said: “I was a real target. Everyone was f-ing with me… I guess because I was high. Easy to f- with.”
Lawrence’s commitment to method acting may already be paying off, as early reviews for Don’t Look Up are already positive. The movie premieres in select theaters on Friday, Dec. 10 and on Netflix on Friday, Dec. 24.
