Jennifer Lawrence spent five hours playing Guitar Hero last night. She herself does not own the game, but her friends next door do. “They’re like Grandma’s Boys,” she says. 

“You know, that film about a bunch of stoners who design video games? I have a key to their house 

while they’re away and I’m seriously considering going there tonight and playing by myself. My mom’s coming to town next week – I can’t wait to teach her to play it, too…”

It is a sea-smoggy morning in Santa Monica and the pair of us are sitting on two beaten-up sofas 

at the back of Lawrence’s local coffee joint outside of which flutters a large white banner reading “Now Open for Diner” [sic].

Even though, at a point this year, there was not one side of one bus anywhere in the world that did not bear a poster of her, bow and arrow at the ready,

as warrior-girl Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Lawrence, 22, is finding it difficult to get a waiter’s attention. Eventually one saunters up and she almost falls on him with a request for coffee. “Pizza hangover,” she explains apologetically, “It’s okay, I’m between movies, I can eat. But five slices of deep crust with ranch dressing on the side? What the fuck is the matter with me? I woke up this morning and my face was so bloated I could barely open my eyes. Believe me, normally? I’m waaaaaay cuter than this…”

Today Lawrence is wearing a little peach sundress with her blue bra straps showing, chipped salmon nail polish and gold flip-flops, looking every inch the Californian girl, out for a day’s shopping at the mall perhaps. It’s the summer version of that slacker look that she and her boyfriend – and X-Men co-star – Nicholas Hoult have down so well: beanies pulled well over their ears, schlumpy T-shirts and all.

“Oh, he really doesn’t care,” she giggles, “like he’ll sometimes wear these white tennis shoes with jeans, then tuck his pants into his socks? Maybe don’t write that, it might embarrass him, but I tell him that all the time. He has absolutely no idea how good-looking he is… I think a lot of women and men hate me because of that…”

Neither can all the chipped nail polish and “pizza face” and slacker gear in the world hide the beauty of Lawrence herself. Think a young Renée Zellweger, mixed with a soupçon of Gisele. With those marzipan cheeks, full yet chiselled; those blue eyes; those thick hanks of honey blonde hair plastering slightly to her dewy skin in the humidity, she has an epic, Todd-AO quality about her presence that you can imagine in a young Elizabeth Taylor.

And goodness, can she work it on the red carpet when she needs to. Remember her in crimson Calvin Klein at the 2011 Oscars after being nominated for her role in Winter’s Bone? The goddess figure she cut at The Hunger Games premiere in that gold lamé Prabal Gurung frock? She can flip from slacker to styled the way she flips from arthouse to blockbuster – in a heartbeat. Oh, don’t get her wrong, she’s as obsessed about clothes as anyone. She adores Proenza Schouler and loves Rachel Zoe’s latest collection, too. Meanwhile, a week after this meeting, she is absolutely killing it at the couture in Dior, all shades and teetering flesh-coloured heels (heels she admits to having a hard time walking in, but one can always take them off in the car afterwards).

So, what does “normal” mean for an Oscar-nominated 22-year-old who is also spearheading the most successful teen franchise ever made? Once upon a time she blurted out in her typical non-cautious way that she would never want to be as famous as Kristen Stewart (her supposed “rival” in the tween franchise stakes), but obviously it hasn’t quite turned out that way.

It sounds so crass, but what must it be like to feel such a role model, such a warrior heroine to so many young girls, bearing such a responsibility on those young shoulders? Has she ever killed anything in real life, for example? She seems such a toughie, such a modern-day Boudica, compared with the comparatively slight Bella Swan.

“Nooo!” she says, with just the teeniest bit of defensiveness (she accidentally knocked out her co-star Josh Hutcherson on the Hunger Games set). “I mean, I guess people expect that of me, and if I had to kill something for survival, maybe I would, and yeah, maybe I was a tomboy when I was growing up. But I’m not now…”

“Of course, there’s a responsibility I’m aware of,” she continues. “In one sense, luckily, it comes naturally because I can’t stay out beyond midnight. I don’t really have an exciting life. But if you mean, am I a natural leader? No. It’s funny, my friends were joking about how I was so not the person who’s in charge of taking turns to go in the hot tub. I just appear that way.”

She certainly does. Lawrence is one of those rare beings who can anchor both the indie film and the blockbuster. She is already number 16 on New York magazine’s cult “Most Valuable Stars” list, hovering just beneath Sandra Bullock and Angelina Jolie, already way above both Cameron Diaz and Natalie Portman. As Donald Sutherland, one of her co-stars, recently put it, she’s a “wonder” – akin, in his eyes, to Laurence Olivier.

Sutherland, by the way, was so astounded she had never read Anna Karenina, he gave her a copy on set. “And do you know what? I feel like a pretentious prick for saying it, but it really is my favourite book,” says Lawrence. “Like that quote that goes, ‘Respect fills the empty place where love should be’? If I had a Myspace, I’d do that as my ad. Do they even have Myspace any more, though? I’m getting sooo tired of the world advancing before I’m ready. Like, all of a sudden, no more CDs! And there I was thinking I was ahead of the game with my little CD binder…”

Currently on a break before filming the sequel to Hunger Games, Catching Fire, this month Lawrence appears on our screens in the thriller/horror House at the End of the Street. Later this winter we’ll see her return to her indie roots in Silver Linings Playbook, a dramedy directed by David O Russell in which she stars opposite Bradley Cooper as a recovering sex addict. “He’s bipolar,” she explains. “I’m an addict who feels worthless and has to fuck someone to feel better, but at the same time knows it’s not going to make her feel better…”

“Jennifer is extraordinary,” says Stanley Tucci, who played navy-haired host Caesar Flickerman in Hunger Games. “She’s one of the few people her age who has that sort of maturity without being cynical. She’s also got this amazing sense of technique without sacrificing any spontaneity. I mean that takes most of us 50 years to learn!”

“Whether one is working with Jennifer or watching her on-screen, one can’t take one’s eyes off her,” agrees Michael Fassbender, her co-star in X-Men: First Class. “Her performances are intelligent and logical through what seems to be a natural intuition.”

“Oh God, Michael, now he really is an artist,” responds Lawrence right back. “Me, I’m just like this idiot girl who doesn’t even know what she’s doing. He doesn’t have any bullshit, you know. I can’t stand this bullshit – even if it’s real. Like, it’s just a job, right, and if you can’t say a ‘who farted?’ joke in an emotional scene… I mean, come on! Let’s just all hang out together! Let’s relax! We all fart, right?”

If Lawrence is not yet a brat, it is probably, as she herself would tell you, because she was not allowed to be one, growing up on her parents’ horse farm in Louisville, Kentucky. Especially by her two older brothers who sometimes “used to throw their soup at me and drag me round the house by my hair and then pretend they didn’t”. (She could fight her own corner, though. At pre-school, she wasn’t allowed to play with the other girls because, as she drily comments, “apparently, I didn’t know my own strength.”)

In the summer, the three of them would help out at the children’s camp their parents Gary and Karen ran (and still run) “which basically meant strapping lots of little kids to tractors and cleaning up five-year-olds’ poop.” On the cheerleading team, she was nicknamed “Nitro” because of her hyperactivity, and Lawrence herself testifies to the chaos of an upbringing which, though blissfully happy, “was scary, sweary and loud, where everyone has a bit of a drinking problem and everyone screams at each other, but it was real fun.” That she is from the South, she says, overlaid everything with a certain “laidbackness” which she feels has helped with the jaggedness of a career in showbiz. Though by laid-back, she clarifies, that definitely doesn’t mean cream-cheese bland. “Bland families, ugh. I hate them.”

She was spotted by a talent scout in Union Square on a trip to New York with her mother, and for months afterwards pestered her parents to let her return to find an agent. They succumbed eventually. A long-running sitcom and a slew of indie roles followed (remember The Burning Plain with Charlize Theron? No, me neither), but what really put her on the map was the role of squirrel-skinning Ree Dolly in Debra Granik’s indie masterpiece Winter’s Bone. The industry was beguiled by this prodigious newcomer with no formal training, barely out of her teens. Audiences loved her because she was terribly chatty and unguarded. She told David Letterman, for example, how she once called up Jodie Foster (a mentor figure who cast her opposite Mel Gibson in The Beaver) to ask for advice about Hunger Games, and how Foster never bothered to call back. “Oh, yeah,” she giggles, “I’m just generally way too talkative. I can’t shut up, especially when I’m nervous and then I get really loud, which is good for chat shows but not a normal reaction, I know…”

Though one senses a steeliness behind that sunny, level smile, Lawrence’s lack of “filter” as she calls it, her people-pleasing tendencies – “Oh, I can’t stand shy people. Like, make it up already. Ask about the weather, don’t stare at your plate and make me feel like I’m making you uncomfortable!” – are a privilege to witness. She reminds me of an American Bridget Jones, if you like, without the keening self-doubt. “Oh, but I dream of playing Bridget Jones!” she cries, clapping her hands at the very idea. Certainly, if I had a daughter, I’d love Jennifer Lawrence to be her role model. “She’s a great role model,” James McAvoy, her X-Men co-star, tells me later on the telephone, “because she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She takes herself and her profession as seriously as she needs to, but she has a sense of perspective on her life. Yes, she’s young, but she’s a woman. You know how some actors are still girls or boys? Well, she’s very much a woman, and a very strong woman at that.”

We’ve been here a while, but Lawrence doesn’t mind. Contrary to what her publicist says, she’s got absolutely nothing to do this afternoon and offers to drive me into town to buy T-shirts. On the way we pass Whole Foods, one of her favourite places to shop until the press caught hold of the fact. Now she has to have her friends go there for her. She is beginning to understand, in other words, the loneliness of being super-famous, not to mention the isolation of living in LA where “it’s such a big deal to get in the car and drive, you find yourself doing 25 shots to justify it… Or not going out at all. That’s exactly why I love London,” she says. She has spent time there both filming X-Men and visiting Nicholas Hoult, whom she has been dating ever since. “All these perfect little pubs in every corner where everyone is fine with sitting and hearing and talking. The more I travel, the more I get tired of LA when I get back. I’ve been to maybe six restaurants in the four years I’ve lived here.”

So far, so good then. A more grounded actor you couldn’t hope to meet, and thank goodness for the support of her family, in particular her down-to-earth mum Karen who, as James McAvoy notes, accompanied her on the X-Men set and would often give her a public dressing-down for her potty mouth. One wonders, though, what with fame being such an exponential thing, and Hunger Games likely to have a third part, how it’s all going to pan out. Will she – like, say, Harrison Ford or Meryl Streep – manage to stay reasonably “normal” with all the pathologies of Hollywood roiling around her?

“Oh, you’re the worst!” she snaps good-naturedly, “You’re just like my friend! I was really upset the day that Hunger Games came out, I was shaking all day wrapped in a blanket, and she said, ‘Dude, have you seen what they’ve done to Britney Spears, she’s standing on a stand and they’re, like, poking at her…’ It’s like, thanks, already!”

“Look,” she adds gracefully, “you watch these little freedoms being eroded away, like being able to pump gas in peace or whatever, but it’s here, and it comes and goes and leaves… My parents raised me to hold down a job, they instilled the work ethic in me. What this is is a job, and that’s what I’m doing, hopefully, my job. As far as jobs go, I’d say I was pretty lucky.”

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Source: Los Angeles Times