Jennifer Lawrence has never pretended to be perfect, but her latest confession about accidentally taking Ambien on the Hunger Games set reminds Us just how real she is.
“I also once took an Ambien in the morning, thinking it was something else,” Lawrence, 35, told Leonardo DiCaprio during the Wednesday, December 17, episode of Variety and CNN’s Actors on Actors.
She recalled, “It was a dance scene with [the late] Philip Seymour Hoffman on the second Hunger Games movie. I was hallucinating.” (Lawrence first played Katniss Everdeen in 2012’s Hunger Games, based on the Suzanne Collins novel of the same name.)
Lawrence remembered having to say lines during 2013’s Hunger Games: Catching Fire and having no “memorizational” skills while on the drug.
“Elizabeth Banks got really annoyed with me because maybe she didn’t know I was on an Ambien,” Lawrence revealed. “But, I kept asking the director, ‘And wait, what does this mean? Wait, and what does this mean? What does that mean?’ She just threw her sides and was like, ‘Fine, let’s just keep talking about it.’”
Lawrence and DiCaprio, who were costars in 2021’s Don’t Look Up, both let out a laugh over the funny incident — and it wasn’t the only time Lawrence had a drug mixup that impacted her career.
“You and I are both obsessive about sleep when we’re working, like, counting the hours,” Lawrence told DiCaprio, 51, while recalling a separate movie mishap. “When I was doing Red Sparrow, I took an Adderall instead of a sleeping pill, and then I didn’t sleep all night.”
She recalled “taking hot showers” and “panicking” about the mistake. “I am not somebody who can function without sleep,” she said. “And then I had to say [the phrase] ‘Senate Armed Services Committee’ in a Russian accent. That sucked.”
DiCaprio joked that Lawrence’s revelations were “key screwups” in her career.
Despite hallucinating on the second Hunger Games, Lawrence continued to play heroic and fierce leader Katniss in two more films: Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 and Part 2, which hit theaters in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
The Oscar winner revealed in June 2023 that she was open to reprising the role when the right project came along.
“Oh, my God – totally! If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent,” Lawrence told Variety of potentially playing the character that made her famous again.
Two years later, Lawrence’s dreams of a Katniss comeback were confirmed.
Multiple outlets reported on December 10 that Lawrence and her Hunger Games counterpart Josh Hutcherson, who played Peeta Mellark in the franchise, would be back for the upcoming film Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. (Us Weekly previously reached out to Lionsgate, Lawrence and Hutcherson for comment.)
While no additional details about Lawrence and Hutcherson’s roles have been released, Sunrise on The Reaping is set to be a flash forward epilogue based on Collins’ second prequel novel.
The book was released in March and is an origin story about Woody Harrelson’s character, Haymitch. It dives into how Haymitch was crowned the winner of the second Quarter Quell, focusing mostly on his life before he mentored Katniss and Peeta. However, the pair make an appearance at the end of the book. The younger Haymitch will be portrayed by Joseph Zada.
