Jennifer Lawrence got real about motherhood and her struggles with postpartum depression.
“Having kids is sacrificial. It’s gratifying and it’s amazing and rewarding, but it’s not not sacrificial,” the actress said in the Saturday, November 1, episode of “The Interview” podcast from The New York Times. “I’d never had to say no to something before that I really wanted to do.”
Lawrence, 35, confessed that it felt “vain and selfish” to want to keep her career going while her family was at home.
“My kids and my family are more important, obviously, but they feel like an equal part of me,” she continued. “I would not be complete if I couldn’t make movies. I just wouldn’t.”
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Lawrence tied the knot with husband Cooke Maroney in October 2019. The couple welcomed son Cy in February 2022. They expanded their family with their second baby earlier this year. Lawrence and Maroney have not publicly shared any details about their newborn.
After becoming a mother for the first time, Lawrence thought “being an actress is the perfect job for being a hands-on mom.” She admitted it wasn’t as easy as she expected.
“So I’m reckoning with, ‘How much is it OK to love this and not want to give it up?’” she explained.
However, with her second child, Lawrence admitted she struggled with “anxiety” and looked for an “escape” with “stories and books.”
“I really lost myself in ideas,” she said. “That’s always been how I digest feelings.”
After Lawrence gave birth to Cy, Martin Scorsese reached out, asking her to play Grace in Die My Love after reading the Ariana Harwicz novel in his book club. Die My Love follows the journey of a young mother struggling with postpartum depression while her husband enters psychosis. Lawrence shared that Scorsese, 82, recommended the book to her, which she picked up right away.
“I had just had my first baby, so it was really overwhelming. I read it in one sitting,” she recalled. “I was actually in a really good place in my postpartum journey. I didn’t struggle in the kind of classic postpartum way. I bonded right away with my son, and so I think because of that I was able to allow my mind to go to those darker places. If I had been in a dark place and read it, I would have been too afraid of it.”
Lawrence was ultimately cast in Die My Love opposite Robert Pattinson. During filming, the Hunger Games actress was pregnant with her second baby.
“It’s another thing that morphed for me and never really felt like one thing. I was pregnant [with my second] when I was filming this,” she said. “There were certain realities that I just couldn’t look at. I spoke to a postpartum specialist who told me that a No. 1 cause of death in mothers in the first year is suicide. And that obviously went into our thinking about the ending, the forest. What is the forest? What is the fire? Do they find their way back to each other? What does all of it mean? I think I saw the forest as more of a cleansing.”
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While Lawrence had a positive postpartum experience with her firstborn, it was completely different with her second.
“I felt like a tiger was chasing me every day. I had so much anxiety,” she shared. “I had nonstop intrusive thoughts that I was at the whim of. They controlled me.”
Lawrence added that the fears stemmed from “picturing every worst-case scenario” and turned into self-doubt. She turned to therapy and medication as a solution.
“I was already in therapy, but I got on a drug called Zurzuvae and I took it for two weeks and it really helped,” she said before joking, “So if anybody’s having postpartum: Zurzuvae. I’m not paid by them, but they could maybe throw me something.”
