Jennifer Lawrence Has A Bizarre Permanent Physical Change From The Hunger Games
Jennifer Lawrence's arms are now two separate lengths due to intense archery training for The Hunger Games.
Back when The Hunger Games first came out, something unexpected happened: Jennifer Lawrence’s character Katniss Everdeen finally made archery cool in a way that characters like Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye never could. Fans young and old around the world decided to master archery on their own because Lawrence made it look so cool on the big screen, but she did so at a fairly major price. In an interview with NPR, Lawrence revealed that her training had “totally changed my body” and that by the time she went to film the sequel, “my shoulders were two inches broader and my right arm is one inch longer than my left arm, permanently.”
Part of what makes Jennifer Lawrence’s story so wild is that she had an impressive champion teacher named Khatuna. When stars like Henry Cavill or Dwayne Johnson train for a big role, we expect them to have fierce trainers, but we admittedly thought that learning how to use a bow and arrow would be more chill. However, Lawrence admitted that her own trainer “would pinch my ear” if she had bad form and that “she didn’t really put up with anything.”
That doesn’t sound like the kind of treatment that a major Hollywood star would receive, but it’s important to remember that Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t exactly a major star back then. At the time, she favored acting in smaller indie roles and still does, with blockbuster franchises like The Hunger Games and X-Men: First Class being the exceptions to the rule. Nonetheless, this film catapulted Lawrence into the Hollywood stratosphere, and she still holds the record for highest-grossing action heroine for her performance as Katniss Everdeen.
When she tells the story about completely changing her body to get a character just right, Jennifer Lawrence makes it sound like it wasn’t a big deal. However, we were impressed with the fact that she was willing to train this hard for a role and that she kept returning for subsequent sequels. Of course, getting tons of money and acclaim probably helped to soothe the pain, but the fact remains that Lawrence was willing to continue putting her body at risk in order to give the fans the performance they deserved.
Since The Hunger Games films wrapped, Jennifer Lawrence has been very selective about the roles she chooses, though some were more controversial than others. For example, Passengers was a film that critics hated, and that left audiences screaming at Chris Pratt’s character (which, let’s be honest, is a pretty natural reaction to most of Pratt’s performances). However, her later movie Don’t Look Up with Leonardo DiCaprio was a bigger hit with critics and ended up receiving many honors and awards, including four different Academy Award nominations.
The next movie on Jennifer Lawrence’s plate is No Hard Feelings, a film in which she plays the mother to a teenage son so awkward that she and her husband try to hire someone from Craigslist to date him. The premise seems a bit weird (like crossing the film Failure to Launch with online incel culture), but we’re confident that Lawrence alone will make it worth watching. However, if she ends up developing any gnarly body changes from her character cruising Craigslist too much, we hope she lets us know.
