Jennifer Lawrence Responds To Backlash After Falsely Claiming She Was First Woman To Lead Action Movie

Jennifer Lawrence clarified her comments about “nobody [putting] a woman in the lead of an action movie” before her own blockbuster success, The Hunger Games.

The actress explained that she misspoke because, during her December 7 Variety: Actors On Actors conversation with Viola Davis, she was really nervous.

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“That’s certainly not what I meant to say at all,” Lawrence told The Hollywood Reporter. “I know that I am not the only woman who has ever led an action film. What I meant to emphasize was how good it feels.”

“But it was my blunder and it came out wrong,” she acknowledged. “I had nerves talking to a living legend.”

During the Variety interview, Lawrence controversially remarked, “I remember when I was doing Hunger Games, nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work — because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”

She added at the time, “It just makes me so happy every single time I see a movie come out that just blows through every one of those beliefs, and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies.”

Many fans on the internet were, of course, quick to identify several previous examples of women in action movies: Linda Hamilton in the Terminator films, Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies and Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to name just a few.

However, others seemed more willing to accept that Lawrence was just attempting to describe a pattern of misogyny in film rather than make that bold and false claim.

Founder of The Black List, an annual survey of popular unproduced screenplays, Franklin Leonard, tweeted partially in Lawrence’s defense after the incident.

“It is untrue that no one had ever put a woman in an action movie before Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games,” he wrote. “It is absolutely true that Hollywood had and has a real bias against women-driven action movies because of this ridiculous belief about who identifies with whom.”