No Hard Feelings star Jennifer Lawrence on why she prefers Christian Bale’s 10-second technique to method acting

Actor Jennifer Lawrence spoke about Hollywood’s debate on method acting versus spontaneous shots. In an interview on ‘Hot Ones’, J-Law spoke about how she was somewhere in between as far as acting techniques are concerned. But once she worked with American Hustle co-star Christian Bale, she saw his “10-seconds” technique and decided to never take up method acting.

Jennifer Lawrence’s latest movie is No Hard Feelings, released in theaters on June 23, 2023.

Here’s what Jennifer Lawrence said about method acting and Christian Bale.

“I would be nervous to work with somebody who is Method,” Jennifer Lawrence said in the video interview. “I would have no idea how to talk to them,” she said, as she would be confused whether she has to be in character while speaking to them even between shots.

“That would make me nervous,” she said, adding, “I haven’t seen another process that I’ve been curious about. You don’t know about them all the time.”

The actor explained that while working with Christian Bale on the film American Hustle (2013), she watched him get in and out of character really fast, and she changed her acting process as well. Christian Bale, known to lose and gain weight in real life as per his roles, is not into method acting 24/7. He gets into the character as the director calls ‘action’.“I had always been very on-off, on-off until I did American Hustle and worked with Christian Bale,” Jennifer Lawrence said.

She revealed that she noticed that when the camera started rolling and the crew was preparing for the shot, “like 10 seconds to action, he (Bale) would start getting ready. I saw that and thought, ‘That seems like a really good idea.’ So I started doing that”.

Andrew Garfield on method acting

• Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield starved himself of food and intimacy while preparing for his role as a Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese’s film Silence (2016).
• Garfield said in 2022 that there are a lot of “misconceptions about what Method acting is”.
• Speaking to Marc Maron on his ‘WTF’ podcast, Garfield said, “People are still acting in that way… It’s actually just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances, and being nice to the crew simultaneously, and being a normal human being, and being able to drop it when you need to and staying in it when you want to stay in it.”

He added that either actors don’t know what method acting is, or they have “just worked with someone who claims to be a method actor who isn’t actually acting the method at all”.

Watch Jennifer Lawrence’s full appearance on “Hot Ones” in the video below.

FAQs

Q1:How many children does Jennifer Lawrence have?
As of June 2023, actor Jennifer Lawrence has one child with her husband Cooke Maroney. The couple has not disclosed the gender of the child, who has been named Cy, but reports say it is a boy.

Q2:How old is Jennifer Lawrence?
Born on August 15, 1990, in Indian Hills, Kentucky, United States, actor Jennifer Lawrence is 32 years old, as of June 2023.