You could see Jennifer Lawrence gradually becoming less and less interested every time she appeared in a new X-Men movie, but she stuck around despite publicly voicing her unhappiness at the exhausting process to be transformed into Mystique.
If she was so miserable, then why did she end up shooting four movies as the blue mutant? It may have had something to do with the millions of dollars being thrown at her each time she re-upped her contract, but we can’t be sure. Lawrence was still a relative unknown when she boarded the franchise, having signed on for First Class before she landed her breakout Academy Award nomination for Winter’s Bone, but things had changed by the time Dark Phoenix rolled around.
Lawrence was now a hugely in-demand Oscar winner, and during an interview with Vanity Fair, she admitted that the period of time stretching from Darren Aronofsky’s mother! to Simon Kinberg’s Dark Phoenix saw her coasting on autopilot and failing to deliver her best work.
“I was not pumping out the quality that I should have. I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right. If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’… I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.”
At least she’s honest, but it’s not as if she’s the only underwhelming aspect of the dismal Dark Phoenix, the critical and commercial flop that ended the once-mighty X-Men series in a blaze of ignominy, with the rights now in the hands of Marvel Studios.
