Never one to hold much back, Jennifer Lawrence opened up on an array of topics—including Harvey Weinstein, her nude photos leaking in Apple’s iCloud hack, and the release of her emails in the Sony cyber attack—in a podcast with The Hollywood Reporter on Monday.
In the podcast, the actress described what it was like to have her nude pictures leaked onto the internet, a memory that dates back to August 2014 when they first began appearing online. “When the [Apple] hacking thing happened, it was so unbelievably violating that you can’t even put it into words,” said Lawrence. “I think that I’m still actually processing it.”
“There’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me,” she said. “You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone—that was a really impossible thing to process.”
Eventually, said Lawrence, other women affected by the breach reached out to her about suing Apple, but she wasn’t interested. “None of that was gonna really bring me peace, none of that was gonna bring my nude body back to me and Nic [Hoult, Lawrence’s boyfriend at the time], the person that they were intended for,” said Lawrence. The hacker responsible for the leaked photos was sentenced to serve nine months in jail in January 2017.
In November of 2014—three months after the photo leaks—Lawrence’s personal data was again dumped onto the internet as a part of the Sony hack. Included among the trove of emails and documents was information that showed how Lawrence had been paid less than her co-stars for the 2013 drama American Hustle.
“It brought up something I was not prepared to talk about publicly, which was gender discrimination pay gap,” said Lawrence. “But then, you don’t always choose those moments—I’m sure all these women didn’t choose this watershed moment for Harvey Weinstein. These things happen, and when they do happen, you have to respond to them.” Since the incident, Lawrence has become the world’s highest paid actress.
Lawrence worked with Weinstein on Silver Linings Playbook, and revealed in the podcast that the producer was “almost paternal” with her. “He was never inappropriate with me,” said Lawrence, who admitted she had heard rumors about the producer. “I thought that we had a nice relationship where when he acted like an —hole, I called him an —hole—I actually think the word I used was ‘a sadistic monster’—but it was just never of that nature, so that was really shocking.”
The actress says that effects of having her privacy violated—and particularly of the Apple hack—still linger.
“A year and a half ago, somebody said something to me about how I was a good role model for girls, and I had to go into the bathroom and sob because I felt like an imposter,” she said. “I felt like, I can’t believe somebody still feels that way after what happened. It’s so many different feelings to process when you’ve been violated like that.”
