Two or three days ago an Elle interview with Silver Linings Playbook star Jennifer Lawrence surfaced, and two colorful quotes kicked up some eight-month-old dust. “In Hollywood, I’m obese,” Lawrence told Elle‘s Maggie Bullock. “I’m considered a fat actress. I’m Val Kilmer in that one picture on the beach.”
Nobody has even hinted at that, least of all myself.
In my 3.20 review of The Hunger Games, I said that Lawrence “seems too big” for costar Josh Hutcherson, and that “she’s a fairly tall, big-boned lady.” At the time N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy and Variety critic Justin Chang passed along vaguely similar observations.
On 3.28 I explained as follows: “I never said that Lawrence being ‘fairly tall’ and ‘big-boned’ was a problem of any kind. I said that in a romantic context she ‘seems too big‘ for her pint-sized costar Josh Hutcherson. (Which she is, comparably-speaking.) Columnist Nell Minow suggested that instead of saying Lawrence is too big for Hutcherson, I should have said Hutcherson ‘is too small for her.’ So I said that also.
“And that was it. I have no problem with tall. I’ve always chuckled at the catcall line ‘tall…and that’s not all!’ On her own semi-statuesque terms Lawrence is totally fine.
“I think the line about Lawrence being ‘too big’ for Hutcherson came from a line in The Big Sleep when Humphrey Bogart‘s Phillip Marlowe tells Elisha Cook Jr.’s Harry Jones that his girlfriend Agnes, played by Sonia Darrin, is “too big for ya.” To which Jones replies, “That’s a dirty crack, mister.”