In the same way that Christopher Columbus and his companions are often considered to be the first (white) people to set foot in America, so has Jennifer Lawrence fashioned herself as the first female action star in American cinema in a Variety interview that is being mocked across the internet for some demonstrably false self-aggrandizement.
Variety quoted Lawrence in a since-deleted tweet saying, “I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie,” as the Silver Linings Playbook star apparently forgot the entirety of Pam Grier’s career and has never heard of the Aliens franchise.
A measured and considerate Twitter politely reminded Lawrence that action movies existed before 2012 and, occasionally, women were in them:
Variety has since reposted the story to their official Twitter with the infamous quote cut out, but the damage had already been done – any point that Lawrence was trying to make about Viola Davis‘ The Woman King, which was the focus of the article, had been obfuscated by the reaction to Lawrence’s unearned self-praise.
As fun as it is to dunk on a celebrity who flaunts their lack of self-awareness as much as Lawrence did by declaring herself the first woman to throw a punch on camera, the reaction to her comments has proven the second point that followed Lawrence’s bizarre claim – despite the achievements of artists such as Grier, Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Yeoh, this list of famous female action stars doesn’t run that much longer than those names. The thread under the deleted Variety tweet was full of thousands of mentions of the same three or four movies – Aliens, Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are apparently the only films that indignant internet action fans can list to prove the presence of female stars.
Two things can be true simultaneously – movie studios expect audiences to be more receptive to male characters in action movies which makes it hard to tell female-focused stories in the genre, and Lawrence boldly declaring herself the glass ceiling-shattering trailblazer of blockbuster heroines after other actresses had been paving the way for women in action movies for decades before Katniss Everdeen hit the scene is hilariously self-centered and deserves to be mocked.