Grace & Grit

After “transforming” her body to play the ultimate spy-seductress in Red Sparrow, Oscar-winner JENNIFER LAWRENCE dresses to kill for Dior. She talks about her gruelling training regimen and why it’s time to fete female artists.

- Georgina Safe

When JENNIFER LAWRENCE was on the press tour of the last Hunger Games film, Mockingjay — Part 2, its director, Francis Lawrence, recommended she read the American spy novel Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews. “It was a book that Francis had been reading and he thought it would be an interesting movie,” Lawrence recalls. She filed it away. Her films Mother! and Passengers intervened, along with all the red carpet and fashion commitments that come with being both an actor whose films have grossed more than $5.5 billion worldwide and the face of Dior. Then she was presented with the script of the aforementioned bestseller. “When I finally had the opportunity to read the script, it was an easy ‘yes’,” Lawrence says of her decision to star in the film adaptation. “It’s a smart, sexy and intense thriller about a secret program that trains young agents in the psychological art of seduction.”

Red Sparrow tells the story of Dominika Egorova (played by Lawrence), a Bolshoi ballerina forcibly recruited to become a “sparrow” — an agent for the Russian security service trained in seduction. Her first target is Nathaniel Nash (Joel Edgerton), a CIA officer who handles the agency’s most sensitive infiltration of Russian intelligence. She falls for Nash, and the two operatives become trapped in a spiral of attraction and deception that endangers their careers and allegiances, and ultimately the security of both countries. “Dominika learns to use her body as a weapon, but struggles to maintain her sense of self during the dehumanising training process,” Lawrence explains. “Finding her power in an unfair system, she emerges as one of the program’s strongest assets.”