Morten Tyldum’s 2016 sci-fi film Passengers is a questionable journey into the vastness of space, and Jennifer Lawrence wishes she’d thought twice about boarding the ship. Speaking with The New York Times, Lawrence expressed regret about taking on the role that paired her with Chris Pratt for a twisted romance feature with a plot that left audience members feeling gross and violated. In the interview with NYT, Lawrence revealed that the pop singer Adele tried to warn her off the project, but she didn’t listen.
When asked which movie left her feeling like she’d made a poor choice, Lawrence said, “Passengers, I guess. Adele told me not to do it! She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her.”
Passengers, starring Lawrence and Pratt, revolves around two people traveling the cosmos and waking from hibernation 90 years early. As they continue their odyssey through the stars, a plot twist reveals a sinister motive for the premature disruption of their slumber. The film ultimately failed at the box office despite starring two of Hollywood’s hottest actors in their prime.
“I was not pumping out the quality that I should have,” Lawrence told Vanity Fair in 2021 about Passengers contributing to her retreating from the Hollywood limelight. “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?'”
Lawrence added, “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.”
While audiences were more forgiving about the film than critics, Lawrence considers Passengers one of her worst films. Burnout can happen to anyone; sometimes, it isn’t easy to see the forest for the trees. Thankfully, Lawrence recuperated well from Passengers with films including Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. She’s filming No Hard Feelings for Gene Stupnitsky now, co-starring alongside Matthew Broderick, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Natalie Morales, Hasan Minhaj, and more.
Are you a fan of Passengers? Did the film tarnish your opinion of Lawrence? Let us know in the comments.