In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast, Jennifer Lawrence revisits her impressive career at the age of 27, and the iCloud hack in 2014 that put her nude photos onto the web.
"I feel like I got gang-banged by the fucking planet," she said frankly in the episode. "Like, there's not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me."
"When the hacking thing happened, it was so unbelievably violating that you can't even put it into words," Lawrence said. "I think that I'm still actually processing it. When I first found out it was happening, my security reached out to me. It was happening minute-to-minute — it was almost like a ransom situation where they were releasing new ones every hour or so."
At the time, Lawrence was squarely between two major releases; X-Men: Days of Future Past, which was a commercial success in May of 2014, and the The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1. She had just turned 24; the breach of privacy shook her and targeted hundreds of other celebrities.
"A lot of women were affected, and a lot of them reached out to me about suing Apple or suing [others] — and none of that was gonna really bring me peace, none of that was gonna bring my nude body back to me and Nic [Lawrence's former boyfriend Nicholas Hoult], the person that they were intended for," she explained. "It wasn't gonna bring any of that back. So I wasn't interested in suing everybody; I was just interested in healing."
"I think, like, a year and a half ago, somebody said something to me about how I was 'a good role model for girls,' and I had to go into the bathroom and sob because I felt like an imposter," Lawrence added. "I felt like, 'I can't believe somebody still feels that way after what happened.' It's so many different things to process when you've been violated like that."
Oddly, hacking has been attached to more than one pivotal moment in Lawrence's career and public discourse; after the Sony hack in 2015, she penned an open letter about Hollywood's gender wage gap, kicking into a high gear a conversation that has not quieted down since then. She recently spoked to THR as part of a roundtable of actresses gaining early awards season buzz, and the group of women addressed Hollywood's gender inequality and recently exposed culture of endemic harassment.
"The big misconception, though, is that this is just in the entertainment industry," Lawrence said in the roundtable. "Once again, the entertainment industry is kind of the stage on which you can see the inner workings of problems that are all over the world...That doesn't mean that there's less sexual abuse going on anywhere else in the world, in any other place of work. But fortunately, we're starting the conversation now."
You can listen to the full episode of Awards Chatter here.
Topics Celebrities
