The Here and Now

Jennifer Lawrence is a happy new mom, with a highly personal new film about trauma—and a lot to say about politics. She and Abby Aguirre unpack it all.

It is safe to say that in her 32 years on planet Earth, Jennifer Lawrence has never struck anyone as the country-club type. So I was surprised to learn that for our first meeting, she wanted to go golfing. “Does she golf?” I asked her publicist over the phone. The publicist wasn’t sure. “I’ll leave that for you to unpack,” she said with a laugh.

I was still trying to figure out what sort of shoes a first-time golfer wears to a driving range when I got word that Lawrence had changed her mind. She no longer wanted to go golfing. I learned she wanted to have an unconventional spa experience, “like when they spank you with those leaves,” she said. With two days to look, I couldn’t locate a spa that offered Russian venik massage in private enough quarters. So we settled on Tikkun, a small, intimate spa in Santa Monica.

I met Lawrence there on a drizzly Friday summer morning. She arrived wearing a pink sundress, brown leather sandals, and an oversized printed cardigan she calls her “Big Lebowski sweater.” Her blond hair was longer than I could ever remember seeing it in photos, almost down to her waist. More immediately striking, Lawrence, who had a baby in February with her husband of three years, the art gallerist Cooke Maroney, was wearing the unmistakable aura of new motherhood—that mix of euphoric new love, sleep deprivation, and a certain wide-eyed rawness that comes with having your world cracked open.