Jennifer Lawrence was bracingly honest about her own experience with motherhood and postpartum at the Cannes press conference for her upcoming film “Die My Love,” a thriller following a new mother descending into madness.
“As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do. And it was just heartbreaking,” Lawrence said of filming the movie. “I had just had my firstborn, and there’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating, which is so interesting. When Lynne moves this couple into Montana, she doesn’t have a community. She doesn’t have her people. But the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating, no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.”
The film, which also stars Robert Pattinson as Lawrence’s helpless husband, premiered last night to a six-minute standing ovation. “Die My Love” is based on author Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel of the same name, which centers on a new mother who enters psychosis after developing postpartum depression. The couple’s marriage is thrown into disarray amid the wife’s mental health struggle.
Lawrence also revealed that she filmed “Die My Love” while being five months pregnant with her second child. “Having children changes everything. It changes your whole life. It’s brutal and incredible,” she said of motherhood. “So not only do they go into every decision of if I’m working, where I’m working, when I’m working, they’ve taught me — I mean, I didn’t know that I could feel so much and my job has a lot to do with emotion. It’s almost like feeling a blister or something — like, so sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best and they’ve changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”
“Die My Love” has received good reviews out of Cannes, with Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman calling it a “showy mess of a martial psychodrama.” Praising Lawrence’s performance, he wrote: “You feel the power of her presence, the hellbent quality of her rage. When it comes to chewing out a blabby cashier, crawling around like an animal, trashing the bathroom and pouring soap products all over the floor, or bashing her head on a mirror, she’s an ace wastrel. But the very force of her destruction makes us want to go: What is happening?”
