It was the best thing ever, and yet totally terrifying. “My heart has stretched to a capacity that I didn’t know about. I include my husband in that. And then they’re both just, like, out there—walking around, crossing streets. He’s gonna drive one day. He’s gonna be a stupid teenager and be behind the wheel of a car. And I’m just gonna be like, Good night! You know? Like, who sleeps?”
In late June, I drove to Lawrence’s house in Beverly Hills. She greeted me at the door in a knee-length gray robe and fluffy white slippers. She had just finished a fitting for this photo shoot, and given the dress code of our first meeting, saw no need to put on more clothes. “I was like, She’s already seen me naked, so who cares.”
Lawrence led me through a sunken den to a large outdoor dining area that was screened in, Southern-style. As she uncorked a bottle of white wine, she warned me that she was in a mood. Not a bad mood, exactly. But a consistently emotional one, brought on by the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade a few days earlier.
Much of her disappointment was directed at certain relatives back in Louisville, Kentucky, where she’d grown up, including her father. The 2016 election had torn open a rift in her family. Repairing it was an ongoing process. Particularly since having a baby, she had been trying to heal. She even discussed with her therapist the recurring nightmares she has about Tucker Carlson. “I just worked so hard in the last five years to forgive my dad and my family and try to understand: It’s different. The information they are getting is different. Their life is different.” Lawrence had a haunted look in her eyes. She would stop at times to apologize or make a self-deprecating joke, then get visibly overtaken by emotion again. I felt like I was watching a real-life version of whatever it is that happens when she acts. “I’ve tried to get over it and I really can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry I’m just unleashing, but I can’t fuck with people who aren’t political anymore. You live in the United States of America. You have to be political. It’s too dire. Politics are killing people.”
The reversal of Roe was reigniting all of it. She had not been entirely in Hillary Clinton’s corner, but still found it incredibly upsetting that the country elected Donald Trump. “It breaks my heart because America had the choice between a woman and a dangerous, dangerous jar of mayonnaise. And they were like, Well, we can’t have a woman. Let’s go with the jar of mayonnaise.” And now, thanks to Supreme Court justices appointed by that dangerous jar of mayonnaise, the unthinkable had happened. “I don’t want to disparage my family, but I know that a lot of people are in a similar position with their families. How could you raise a daughter from birth and believe that she doesn’t deserve equality? How?”
Growing up in a conservative home, Lawrence thought of herself as Republican. But it was almost a cultural thing, like sports or something. She had the notion that there were two teams and that the Republicans were her team. Then one night when she was 16, she was watching 30 Rock and Liz Lemon said something along the lines of, I’m not a crazy liberal. I just think people should drive hybrid cars. It made sense. It seemed rational. Later, when she made movies in other countries, she saw how money always tended to concentrate at the top, not just in the United States, how it rarely trickled down to working people. She gathered more perspective the more money she made. To her, “Republican” had always meant: Why should my taxes pay for your haughty lifestyle? Now she saw holes in that logic. “Nobody likes to see half their paycheck go away, but it made sense to me. Yeah, for the greater good, I guess it makes sense.”