Jennifer Lawrence is doing another X-Men movie, but she's not very happy about it. The actress told Entertainment Weekly for the magazine's first look at the upcoming Dark Phoenix that she didn't plan on playing Mystique ever again after X-Men: Apocalypse, but director Simon Kinberg roped her into doing it.
"I kinda fucked myself," she joked. In the series, Lawrence plays Mystique, a mutant with scaly blue skin. Though Mystique's mutation allows her to transmogrify into other humans, her natural form is blue. This means that the role requires some heavy-duty makeup. It's the makeup that gets Lawrence.
"I love these movies — it’s just the paint," she told EW during a set visit in 2015.
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Lawrence told Graham Norton during an appearance on his show in 2016 that she couldn't sit to pee in the costume. "The guys who made it were like, 'Well, she's a girl. She doesn't go to the bathroom," she said. "So, I pee standing up out of a funnel." In that interview, she was talking about X-Men: Apocalypse, the last film in Lawrence's contract. Before that film, Lawrence's makeup process was even more arduous. Lawrence said on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon that during production of X-Men: First Class, her makeup process took up to eight hours. Then, for X-Men: Days of Future Past, the process was reduced to three hours.
When she did First Class, Lawrence explained, she "didn’t care about fumes and toxins."
"Now I’m almost 25 and I’m like, ‘I can’t even pronounce this and that’s going in my nose? I’m breathing that?’” she said.
But, Lawrence wanted to work with Kinberg. She told the screenwriter-turned-director that if he directed Dark Phoenix, she, too, would participate in the film. Kinberg agreed to the bargain, and now Lawrence has to hold up her end of the deal.
She added that Kinberg's presence made Dark Phoenix an even easier film to shoot. "I suddenly felt more connected to my character than I ever have been before," she said. Perhaps it helps that her makeup process is no longer the length of your average sleep.
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