by Nadia Cohen
Since she was still technically a pupil in high school, and therefore required by law to complete her education, Jennifer had no choice but to juggle her acting jobs with home schooling. She hated having to spend long sessions with a private tutor and in order to make up for the lessons she missed, she would sometimes have to spend up to nine hours at a time studying in her room – which she later described as the worst period of her life. It was an ordeal, but she endured the downsides of her new life because she knew it was the only way her parents would allow her to pursue her dream. Her efforts paid off and after taking her exams online, she graduated from full-time education two years early with 3.9 Grade Point Average – almost perfect results. But despite her impressive achievements, college was never on the cards for Jennifer, and at last she was free to focus entirely on her career.
As time went on and she gradually found herself landing more and more paying jobs, Jennifer had to fly out to Los Angeles to meet film studio executives. Rather than finding it an exciting new opportunity, however, she found the sprawling city unfriendly and struggled to get to grips with a second move in just a few short months.
She found it far more difficult to make friends on the West Coast, and missed her old apartment in the Big Apple, where she had only just begun to feel settled. Lacking in much of a social life, she kept herself busy between jobs by babysitting for a nine-year-old in order to pass the time and boost her meagre income.
One of her first booked gigs was a commercial for mobile communications giant Verizon. It was also one of the first instances when she became severely star-struck (as she still does today) when she got to meet Paul Marcarelli, the guy who has since become famous in America for his catchphrase, ‘Can you hear me now?’ It was a small part, but Jennifer was nothing if not determined and did not have to wait too long for her first big break, which came with a recurring role as Lauren Pearson in three seasons of The Bill Engvall Show. The hit comedy series ran on the American television channel TBS between 2007 and 2009, and audiences immediately warmed to Jennifer. It was a lifeline for her, and she later recalled that the cast and crew became like her family since she was so lonely in Los Angeles, and earning a regular salary for the first time meant she could also accept parts she found more interesting and challenging in low-budget indie movies.
Within months of beginning her acting career, a seventeen-year-old Jennifer was awarded the Young Artist Award for being an ‘outstanding young performer in a television series’, thanks to her role in The Bill Engvall Show, and it quickly got her noticed. Before too long she had moved on to other acting gigs, landing herself a variety of small roles in a host of American TV programmes including Company Town, Cold Case, Monk, Medium, Not Another High School Show and Garden Party – an LA-set drama which is unlikely to be remembered for much, except perhaps Jennifer’s ill-advised perm in the insignificant supporting role of Tiff.
She worked hard to perfect her craft, and tried to avoid taking roles that she might later regret, and it was during this busy spell that she landed her first feature-film part in the highly acclaimed 2008 movie The Poker House. The directorial debut of flop movie Tank Girl star Lori Petty hardly seemed like a fertile ground for any novice actress to thrive in, and the garish overacting of Selma Blair as a strung-out prostitute, not to mention Chloë Grace Moretz as her youngest daughter, were considered fairly dire, but Jennifer managed to get across some subtle anguish in her first dramatically testing part, as well as projecting an underage sexual curiosity which some critics likened to Juliette Lewis’s excellent performance in Cape Fear (1991).
There was even a tough rape scene, which was seen as a brave move for Jennifer at such an early stage in her career. In the harrowing scene, her character is attacked by her mother’s pimp, and Jennifer was naturally concerned her own parents would disapprove of the sexually explicit nature of what she was asked to do, given that she was still in her teens. ‘I hid the Poker House script from my parents so that I could audition for it,’ she told W magazine. ‘By the time I got the part, it was too late: They had to let me do it. During the filming of the rape scene, my mom was there. I was okay with it.
‘I was very ballsy at that age – the typical kind of stubbornness that comes with being a teenager. I started out fearless, and now I’m terrified.’
From that moment on, Jennifer never looked back. Audiences could not get enough of her raw and honest performances, and it was clear to critics and industry experts alike that the road to a stellar career in Hollywood lay ahead, and she was on the fast track.
The Poker House led to her being awarded the Los Angeles Film Festival’s award for Best Performance in the Narrative Competition. The accolade boosted her profile further and casting directors had her very much in their sights. The Poker House was quickly followed by another well-received role in a movie titled The Burning Plain, alongside Kim Basinger, in which she played the younger version of Charlize Theron’s character Sylvia – a young woman struggling with her parents’ fractured lives. The role brought Jennifer her first serious critical attention, and even a Venice Film Festival award, for her crucial part in what turned out to be a neglected, off-puttingly self-serious melodrama from the writer of Babel and Amores Perros.
As Kim Basinger’s morose daughter, who grows up to become a fiercely miserable Charlize Theron, Jennifer appeared sullen but also managed successfully to keep some mystery in play before making the hideous mistake that would go on to blight her life. For her role in the film, directed by Guillermo Arriaga, she earned herself another trophy, this time it was the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Emerging Actor/Actress at the Venice Film Festival.
She took a brief rest from movies to star in a music video for the rock band Parachute, to promote their song, ‘The Mess I Made’, but before long she was back to film-making, appearing in the Oscar favourite Winter’s Bone, her breakthrough role, which some critics still consider to be her best performance to date.
Jennifer played the lead, seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly, in this hugely successful hard-hitting drama, which was to become her first chance to carry a whole picture on her shoulders. Her strong performance was praised for being credible and confident. US film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, praising Jennifer’s ‘hope and courage’ while Rolling Stone magazine described her performance as ‘more than acting, it’s a gathering storm’.
Ree was a teen playing surrogate parent in a grim, backwards-looking, drug-fuelled world, a far cry from anything Jennifer had ever known, and yet she proved that she had the skills to get inside a young woman’s headspace and intuitively figure out the fight she had to win.
The director, Debra Granik, almost did not cast her as at first she felt that Jennifer was too pretty to play the tough-girl protagonist, but Jennifer wanted the role badly and was not prepared to take no for an answer. Determined to change the director’s mind, she convinced her to meet with her in person and took typically unconventional steps to prepare for that first meeting. Jennifer took a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York, walked thirteen blocks in sleet and rain and showed up with unwashed hair and a runny nose; she admitted she made herself look ‘poor as dirt’. Of course this calculated and highly unusual move paid off, landing her the part of Ree, who lived in the Ozark Mountains, where she cared for her mentally ill mother and two younger siblings.
The movie also starred Vera Farmiga, and both actresses were praised for their portrayal of young women dealing with the drug culture. Farmiga’s character was battling addiction, while Jennifer’s character was battling the crystal meth addicts of the Ozarks.
To prepare for the role Jennifer had to learn to fight, chop wood and how to carry a gun. On the advice of a close relative back in Kentucky, she spent weeks carrying an empty shotgun everywhere with her because she feared anyone watching the film who knew anything about guns would know within seconds whether or not she had ever held a weapon before. She wanted to feel as if she was truly hunting, no
t just pretending.
Jennifer won rave reviews for the role, including Peter Travers from Rolling Stone who described it as: ‘A performance that is more than acting. It’s a gathering storm, a roadmap to what’s tearing Ree apart.’
The widespread acclaim also won Jennifer her first Academy Award nomination – in 2011 she was short-listed for the Best Actress Oscar. By now it was clear to anyone with even a passing interest in the movie industry that Jennifer was already becoming hot property and would soon be a megastar. It was simply a matter of time.
She went on to land a string of other roles but they came with mixed success. In 2009 Jodie Foster cast her in The Beaver, and although her screen time is modest as Anton Yelchin’s high-school crush, she managed to make something out of a part that could easily have been forgotten. She convincingly played the coolest and toughest girl in school, and showed an impressive confidence opposite the biggest co-stars she had met so far, who included Mel Gibson.
The movie sparked quite a controversy due to some of its themes – it featured the depressed CEO of a failing toy company on the verge of bankruptcy (Walter Black); to add to his woes he is kicked out of the house by his wife and forced to live in a hotel. Played by Mel Gibson, he finds a puppet of a beaver in a garbage bin and develops an alternate persona, which speaks solely through the puppet, eventually allowing him to bond again with his family and pulling him out of financial doom.
But with its portrayal of dissociative identity disorder and suicide, when the film was rated PG-13, its release was delayed by two years. However, the role led Jennifer to be invited to join the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in June 2011, a select group dedicated to the advancement of the art of film-making.
By the time The Beaver was eventually released in 2011 Jennifer had already been nominated for Best Actress for Winter’s Bone, although on the night she eventually lost out to Natalie Portman, who won for Black Swan.
Undaunted by her loss, Jennifer was typically resilient and went on to shoot Like Crazy (2011), another smash in which she was reunited with Yelchin, playing a sexy colleague who falls for him when visa issues keep him an ocean apart from his true soulmate. Although a small role, it was lauded as quite special since she had resisted the urge to make her character Samantha any kind of nuisance or unhinged lover. Instead she quietly and tearfully absorbs the obvious truth that her boyfriend’s heart is elsewhere, and slips out of the movie with a sad grace.
After that she won a tiny role as Young Zoe in The Devil You Know, a botched indie melodrama that was shot and shelved, then opportunistically released in 2013 when Jennifer had already hit the big time. She played the sixteen-year-old version of Rosamund Pike’s character, slinking around in flashbacks looking coolly dangerous.
Up next was House at the End of the Street, a suburban psycho-thriller directed by former BBC Radio1 DJ Mark Tonderai in 2012. It was considered a huge flop, although once again critics praised Jennifer’s performance despite the film’s failings. She appeared embarrassed about appearing in such a badly received project and made a joke about the role when she won an award for American Hustle from the New York Film Critics Circle in 2013.
In an open letter to the Circle she joked about it, writing: ‘The critics have been very kind to me thus far in my career. But I guess I’m not receiving this for House at the End of the Street, so you guys must have missed that one, right?’
CHAPTER TWO
HITTING THE BIG TIME
By the time Jennifer had been cast in a handful of big screen roles, industry experts were starting to sit up and take notice, and the usual rounds of gruelling auditions were starting to become little more than a mere formality. So it came as something of a surprise when she was asked to read for the highly coveted role of Bella Swan in the Twilight saga as a seventeen-year-old but lost out to Kristen Stewart. Although she was disappointed at the time, Jennifer later admitted she was glad not to have won the part in the teenage vampire movies because it would have stopped her playing Ree in The Winter’s Bone, widely considered to be the launch role that got her noticed and led to countless lucrative opportunities.
She also auditioned for Superbad but did not land that one either; at the time losing what turned out to be Emma Stone’s breakout role was considered a major setback, and Jennifer started to privately fear that perhaps she had simply been enjoying beginner’s luck. It was around then that producers and casting directors began hinting that she should work on slimming down, and it was suggested to Jennifer that perhaps if she lost a little weight she might have a chance of being selected for better roles.
Furious at the highly personal nature of these demands, Jennifer fired back at them angrily – even going so far as to claim that calling someone fat should be made ‘illegal’ – and she refused to bow to the superficial and sexist demands that were being made of her by industry bosses. In an interview with US TV host Barbara Walters, Jennifer asked: ‘If we’re regulating cigarettes and cuss words because of the effect they have on our younger generation, why aren’t we regulating things like calling people fat?’
It was the first of many occasions during which Jennifer would display physical and emotional confidence way beyond her years. Thanks to her down-to-earth upbringing, she had never been bothered about her looks or her body, and was determined not to be sucked into the vicious cycle of calorie counting and plastic surgery so popular among women trying to make it big in Hollywood.
But Jennifer did admit that she had a fear of being typecast, as up until this point she had only really been selected for a handful of tough, gritty roles. ‘It’s easy to get pigeonholed, so I think it’s important that when one thing gets really big it’s a wise decision to do the opposite,’ she told Teen Vogue. Although she refused to starve herself for a role, Jennifer understood the need to appear attractive to audiences, and so she chose a surprisingly elegant and sexy dress, a slinky red Calvin Klein, for her first appearance on the Oscars red carpet, and posed for her first risqué photo shoot, which appeared in GQ magazine. And she remains convinced that making a series of calculated moves on her part, while remaining relentlessly cheerful and upbeat in every interview and public appearance, helped her swiftly move on to the next opportunity. And it paid off.
It was not long at all before she landed the role of Mystique in X-Men: First Class (2011), alongside James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult and Michael Fassbender, and became close to the entire cast. ‘I had a blast,’ she told Teen Vogue. ‘I was living in London for five months, and the whole cast all legitimately love each other. We got addicted to hanging out.’
She played the younger version of the character originally played by Rebecca Romijn in the earlier X-Men series. When asked what it had been like preparing for the high-profile role in the action blockbuster, Jennifer told People magazine that she had to shape up for the role, and it took seven women every day during the four months of shooting to paint her entire body blue.
‘It was two hours a day of weight training and circuits. She’s a superhero, and I’m a wimp, so I had to get some muscle. I needed a few layers of airbrushed body paint, five layers of splattered paint and strategically placed scales. The entire process took about eight to ten hours.’ Jennifer has likened the strange experience to ‘a bizarre sleepover’.
The hours were long and much of the tough action sequences required of her proved gruelling but Jennifer’s hard work paid off. She not only found a boyfriend when she met British actor Nicholas Hoult on set, but shortly after starting work on X-Men, Jennifer got the call she had been waiting for.
Her audition with director Gary Ross had gone better than expected: ‘I’d never seen an audition that good. Ever,’ he told MTV News. ‘I saw someone who I knew I was going to be watching for decades.’
To her amazement she was told that she had been chosen out of dozens of far better-known actresses to play Katniss Everdeen in the phenomenally successful film adaptation of The Hunger Games trilogy. She may ha
ve been a fairly new kid on the block, but Jennifer knew how popular the books had been, and it was a pretty safe bet that the films would be huge hits, too.
This was the role that would instantly catapult her to A-list status, and make her a household name around the world. But after witnessing the phenomenal level of fame Kristen Stewart had achieved after landing the part of Bella Swan in Twilight, Jennifer was a little wary. She also knew that the fame came hand in hand with relentless press intrusion and intense public scrutiny that would doubtless affect her personal life. Taking it meant she could never be anonymous again. Knowing the risk she was taking, and how it could have a knock-on effect for her family and friends, she was at first understandably apprehensive about accepting the part of Katniss. Although she was a huge fan of the novels by Suzanne Collins, Jennifer was also terrified of how such a huge film franchise might affect her career. She was concerned about being typecast after starring in the X-Men action movies, and forever associated with one particular type of warrior character.
She spent three days carefully mulling over all her options, having in-depth discussions with her family, agents and managers, carefully considering every aspect of such a life-changing decision before she cautiously accepted the coveted role of a lifetime. Of course it was to prove a very wise move, but even as she signed the contract, there was no way that Jennifer could possibly have predicted what a huge phenomenon the movies would prove to be, nor how dramatically her life was to change.
She would earn so much money that she never needed to work again and her parents could retire into the lap of luxury – but Jennifer was too ambitious for that and her family did not want her money anyway. The first movie grossed over $408 million worldwide, smashing dozens of records, and prior to its release none of the previous top two hundred box-office hits had been built around a female star.