Don’t Look Up director cast Jennifer Lawrence for her anger. Adam McKay’s latest uber-topical satire also stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Timothee Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande and Chris Evans.
After previously tackling the 2008 financial meltdown with The Big Short and the rise of Dick Cheney with Vice, McKay now sets his sights on a timely story of impending world catastrophe. In Don’t Look Up, DiCaprio and Lawrence play a pair of low-level astronauts who must go on a whirlwind media tour to warn humanity about a comet that is about to destroy the Earth. Though the film is literally about a comet threatening Earth, its real subject is climate change and ongoing efforts by advocates to get the world to listen to their dire warnings about the fate of the planet, sometimes in the face of massive political and cultural resistance.
Though McKay certainly assembled plenty of star power for Don’t Look Up it seems the director is hinging a lot of his movie’s effect on Lawrence, who plays Kate Dibiasky, a graduate student who is studying to be an astronomer. In McKay’s own words, it was Lawrence’s anger that specifically appealed to him when it came to the decision to cast her, and indeed he even used her past angry performances to help inform his writing process. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he said:
No one has more beautiful anger than Jen. When she unleashes, it is a sight to behold. Think of her in Silver Linings Playbook, her in everything. I wanted to cut loose with a strong, funny truth-teller woman and that’s Jen Lawrence. I mean, that character poured out of me. I would just picture Jen and you knew exactly what she would say…. She’s going to be the one who doesn’t play the game. And, of course, she’s going to be pilloried for it, which will be heartbreaking, but she’s never going to play the game.
Lawrence indeed has played more than her share of “strong, funny truth-teller” women over the course of her career, doing so effectively enough to snag four Oscar nominations and one win. Unfortunately the actor has seen her awards-seasons fortunes flag in recent years as prestige projects have seemingly been harder for her to come by. McKay of course has his own magic touch when it comes to directing actors to Oscar-worthy performances, with Christian Bale having been nominated for both Vice and The Big Short, and Amy Adams and Sam Rockwell also picking up nominations for Vice.
It remains to be seen if the McKay touch brings any awards buzz Lawrence’s way in the coming weeks. But Don’t Look Up certainly looks to have much the same combination of scathing satire and character exploration that made The Big Short and Vice such darlings of the Academy. Even if Lawrence doesn’t find herself back on the nomination list, it seems McKay got what he wanted from her when he earmarked her to be the voice of angry female truth in his movie about impending catastrophe and the many ways humans manage to hide their heads in the sand rather face cold hard facts.
Source: Vanity Fair
