“Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence may be a little curvier than your average Hollywood ingenue, but she’s happy with her physique and says it’s the fat-shaming weight critics who have the problem, not her.
“It’s hilarious, the way I’m supposedly the overweight one [in Hollywood],” Lawrence told the November 2012 issue of Vogue UK. “Like, they got me at the movies yesterday and the [photo] caption read something like, ‘Curvy star cannot wait to dig into tub of popcorn.’ I mean, Come on!”
Amazingly, Jennifer was criticized as too meaty for the role of heroine Katniss Everdeen in the “Hunger Games.” In March 2012, Manohla Dargis of the “New York Times” remarked that Lawrence wasn’t thin enough to convincingly play the part of a starving teen.
Dargis wrote: “A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.”
The athletic 5-foot-7 Jennifer says it’s these types of comments and its influence on the perpetuation of the size-zero celebrities idealized in pop culture today that foster an unhealthy body image that damages young women’s self-esteem.
“I’m so tired of the lollipops,” says Lawrence, referring to underweight women with gaunt bodies attached to oversized “lollilop” heads. “I’m just a normal girl who likes to eat.”
Jennifer recalls that she and her friends grew up idolizing scary-skinny celebrities because they made headlines for being so thin.
“I remember when I was 13 and it was cool to pretend to have an eating disorder because there were rumors that Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie were anorexic,” Lawrence told Seventeen. “I thought it was crazy.”
Jennifer, who grew up in Louisville, Ky., says it’s important for girls to have positive fitness role models. “I think it’s really important for girls to have people to look up to and to feel good about themselves,” she said. “[I’m] so sick of these young girls with their [crazy] diets.”
Jennifer is currently filming “Catching Fire,” the sequel to the blockbuster hit, “The Hunger Games.”
