Jennifer Lawrence swears her “great hormones” were the secret weapon behind her blistering turn in Die, My Love, the Cannes-debut drama that casts the Oscar winner as a new mother spiraling through postpartum chaos.
Speaking on the Croisette,he 34-year-old star shocked reporters by admitting she was already five months pregnant during principal photography, yet felt so energized she could “dip into visceral emotion” on demand.
“In the script this woman’s sanity frays from a perfect storm of postpartum hormones and an identity crisis,” Lawrence explained. “She’s asking, who am I as a mother, a wife, and a creative human being? Am I disappearing? I could tap straight into that confusion, even though my own pregnancy hormones were making me feel fantastic.” The actress, whohares three-year-old son Cy and a second child born this Marchith art-gallerist husband Cooke Maroney, insisted the timing was pure luck: “If I’d been in therutal first-trimester nausea, forget it. But at four and a half or five months, I was honestly glowing.”
Lawrence’s candor about motherhood isn’t new. Before Cy’s 2022 arrival, she confessed to Vogue that she feared she might love her baby “only as much as my cat”, a worry fueled by friends who admitted they didn’t bond instantly with their newborns. “It’s so scary to talk about motherhood,” she told the magazine then. “Everyone’s experience is different, so you don’t want someone to feel bad if it wasn’t fireworks on day one.” Those earlier insecurities make her Cannes confidence all the more striking.
In Die, My Love, an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s ferocious novel, Lawrence’s character is consumed by intrusive thoughts, sexual frustration, and creative paralysis while raising an infant in rural France. The actress says that while her own reality is far sunnier, pregnancy granted her physical cues she could magnify for the role: “Your body’s already changing, your mind’s racing at night, so I let those sensations snowball into the character’s darker headspace.”
Off camera, the mood was lighter. Lawrence revealed that between takes, the crew kept a “pregnancy snack station” stocked with pickles and mango slices, and director Luca Guadagnino scheduled intimate scenes early in the day so she could nap duringoon set-ups. “They treated me like a queen bee,” she laughed, “which is what every pregnant lady deserves.”
The Cannes audience rewarded the performance withh a six-minute standing ovation, buzzing over how Lawrence channels postpartum rage without slipping into cliché. Critics note the irony: a film about a mother unraveling powered by an actress who felt “super-humanly balanced” thanks to prenatal hormones. Lawrence shrugs: “Bodies are weird. Hormones are weird. This time they worked in my favor.”
Away from the festival glare, the Hunger Games icon remains blunt about the slogg of real-life parenting. She and Maroney juggle midnight feedings for the newborn while prepping Cy for preschool, and she jokes that any future project must cometh on-set childcare, “or I’m not leaving the house.” Still, she wouldn’t trade the chaos: “I used to think acting was everything. Now acting is recess compared to the main event, my kids.”
As for her earlier doubts about maternal instinct? Lawrence smiles. “Turns out I love my children way more than my cat,” she says, “though the cat’s still pretty great.”
