What you need to know
Jennifer Lawrence is sharing her stance on speaking out about President Donald Trump’s administration in the current political climate.
Lawrence, 35, appeared on the Nov. 1 episode of The New York Times’ podcast “The Interview” and explained her fears about commenting on President Trump’s second term.
Asked if he intended to be as outspoken as he was during Trump’s first term, Lawrence said: “I don’t really know if I should.” “The first Trump administration was so unruly. How could we let things go on like this? I felt like I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“But as we went from election to election, we found that celebrities had no effect on who people voted for,” she reflected. “So what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion about adding fuel to the fire that’s tearing our country apart. We’re so divided.”
Notably, the Oscar winner previously told PEOPLE that she would support former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, saying that “abortion is literally on the ballot.”
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The Die My Love star also explained that she doesn’t want her political opinions to deter people from seeing her films, which “change consciousness and change the world.”
“I want to protect my work so that you can fall in love with what I’m doing and what I’m showing,” she continued. “If I can’t say anything that will lead to peace or lower temperatures or some sort of solution, then I just don’t want to be part of the problem. I don’t want to make the problem worse.”
Lawrence has decided to stop talking about Trump in public, but said she wants her work to reflect her political positions. She said her production company, Excellent Cadaver, produces documentaries on subjects ranging from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the abortion ban in Texas.
“A lot of the films that come out of my production company are politically charged, and I feel like I can help in that way,” she said of her company’s documentaries “Bread and Roses” and “Zulawski vs. Texas.”
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Lawrence candidly said he “probably” regrets Trump’s comments during his first term.
She acknowledged that President Trump’s second term “feels different.”
“Because he said what he was going to do,” she added. “We knew what he had been doing for four years. He was very clear and that’s what we chose.”
In 2015, before the president’s first term, she told Entertainment Weekly that it would be “the end of the world” if Trump were elected.
After her first win, she said, “My head exploded.” She added, “I felt helpless, I felt scared, I felt defeated, and I realized that the only thing I could really do was educate myself.”
Years later, in October 2020, Lawrence told the Absolutely Not podcast that she “grew up being a Republican,” but that “everything changed” when “Donald Trump got elected.”
Looking ahead to the 2024 presidential election, she also urged people to vote: “Take action by voting. The most important thing we can do right now is just vote.”
