Jennifer Lawrence is ready to play the girl on fire again.
The Oscar winner says she is open to returning to the “Hunger Games” franchise after she became a household name for her work as Katniss in the four movies.
“Oh, my God – totally!” Lawrence told me Friday morning during a Zoom video interview while promoting her new R-rated coming-of-age comedy, “No Hard Feelings.” “If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent.”
Looking off camera, she added, “My producing partner just clutched her heart.”
The four “Hunger Games” installments starred Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Stanley Tucci, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland and Woody Harrelson. The first, released in 2012, was directed by Gary Ross with the following three helmed by Francis Lawrence.
An upcoming prequel movie, “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” stars Viola Davis, Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman and Hunter Schafer. The film chronicles Coriolanus Snow’s rise to power to become President of Panem. It is set for release Nov. 17.
“No Hard Feelings” is a raunchy comedy starring Lawrence as a 32-year-old Uber driver who is hired by a wealthy couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) to date and seduce their 19-year-old son (Andrew Barth Feldman) to help him get out of his shell before heading off to college in exchange for a car.
I asked Feldman, 21, if he remembers seeing Lawrence in “The Hunger Games” for the first time.
“You probably weren’t even born,” Lawrence cracked.
Feldman replied, “I was probably about 10 years old. I read the books and then the movies came out and it was a phenomenon. I watched them recently just for fun and I did text [Lawrence] when it was happening. Those moves are so good. That whole genre didn’t exist yet. Nor did we know that genre of film incorporate such a huge and truthful and beautiful performance from Jen.”
Lawrence quipped, “I can’t believe you could read when you were 10.”
“No Hard Feelings,” directed by Gene Stupnitsky (“Good Boys”), is in theaters June 23.
