Jennifer Lawrence has revealed how her close friend Adele tried to persuade her to back out of Passengers, the 2016 sci-fi thriller in which she costarred with Chris Pratt and is widely regarded as her career low point.
Lawrence’s career took a little hit when her production was dominated by critically panned films and X-Men sequels with diminishing returns after she shot to superstardom in the early 2010s with a leading part in the Hunger Games franchise and an Oscar-winning performance in Silver Linings Playbook.
“Adele told me not to do it!” Lawrence told the Times. “She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her.”
Passengers starred Lawrence and Pratt as voyagers on a spaceship who get woken up out of hibernation long before their planned arrival. Though marketed as a romance between two of Hollywood’s biggest stars at the time, Passengers ended up being “a risible two-hour exhibit of sci-fi Stockholm Syndrome,” as EW critic Chris Nashawaty put it in his D+ review. Passengers didn’t fare much better elsewhere, as evidenced by its dismal rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Pratt and producer Neal Moritz continued to defend Passengers months after it had been seen in theatres, with Pratt claiming he was “very caught off guard” by the negative reviews and that he thought the finished product was “really terrific.”
But Lawrence didn’t hold back when she spoke. She stated, “I was like, ‘Oh no, you guys are here because I’m here, and I’m here because you’re here. Wait, who determined that this was a good movie?'” when discussing the ventures that failed to connect with audiences or critics.
She claimed that around that time in her career, she started to feel “more like a celebrity than an actor, cut off from my creativity, and cut off from my imagination.”
