When it comes to learning from your mistakes, acknowledgment is often the first step—and it’s a step Jennifer Lawrence is finally ready to take with her 2016 flop Passengers. Aiming for sensuality but landing closer to Stockholm Syndrome, the film was panned, and Lawrence now counts it among the projects she regrets signing her name to.
In a new interview with The New York Times, Lawrence reflects on her winding career, which saw a meteoric rise followed by a string of middlingly-reviewed big-name movies like Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, the spy thriller Red Sparrow, and, yes, Passengers. Lawrence cites the project as a film that made her think, “Wait, who decided that this was a good movie?’”
“Passengers... Adele told me not to do it!” Lawrence shares. “She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her.”
The widely (but not-so-unfairly) maligned film saw Lawrence share the screen with Chris Pratt, years before his massacre of Mario’s Italian accent. As Katie Rife puts it in The A.V. Club’s review of Passengers, Lawrence can “act circles around” Pratt and his affable charms. But she can’t save Passengers from turning “frothy sci-fi romance into an astonishingly retrograde statement on autonomy and consent.”
Looking back, Lawrence says that after watching multiple films just not click with her fan base, she started to lose the vision she’d once had for an acting career. “I felt like more of a celebrity than an actor,” she said, “cut off from my creativity, my imagination.”
Enter: Adele, and the Greenwich Village bar Pieces. Lawrence said that’s where she competed in games of musical shots with the singer, sang karaoke, and traded conversation about their respective glistening careers in March 2019.
Clearly, Adele had some candid advice that resonates with Lawrence years later. But the question remains: if Adele was dead right about Passengers back then, what else does she know... and when did she know it!