A Clip from Conan O’Brien

The Oscar winner is earning raves again for playing a demented housewife.

EW YORK — Work can be your salvation, your port in a mad, mad celebrity storm. Just ask Jennifer Lawrence, who finds solace and consistency on movie sets, surrounded by people who don’t care about her latest sultry Dior ads, or whether her new haircut is too extreme.

“Nobody treats you any differently. They see celebrities all the time. Especially on The Hunger Games, people have known each other for years. I feel like myself,” she says.

Her first day back on set, one day after winning an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, Lawrence earned a standing ovation from her Hunger Games: Catching Fire cast and crew.

“And then, nothing changed. We shot two more weeks in the mud. When she messes up her lines, she gets teased by Woody (Harrelson) that she’s going to have to give her award back,” says Fire director Francis Lawrence (no relation). “She’s smart and goofy and silly and talented and endearing. It’s all of those things. There isn’t an actress around like her right now. She has an intuitive talent for acting, but also a soul and gravitas that most girls her age don’t have. She captures the loneliness of Katniss.”

And the blowsy appeal of Rosalyn Rosenfeld, the lonely, yet certifiable housewife she plays in American Hustle. When filmmaker David O. Russell, who directed Lawrence to her Oscar for playing a disturbed, acid-tongued, yet vulnerable widow in Silver Linings, called her about Hustle, she had planned to take a break. But the script, about a ’70s scammer (Christian Bale), his pushy spouse (Lawrence), his manipulative mistress (Amy Adams) and the memorably coiffed, deeply ambitious FBI agent trying to get a career break (Bradley Cooper), proved irresistible.

“(Rosalyn’s) always screaming and drinking and you don’t know why. The first step was making her young, making her religious and making her someone I could forgive. She’s dumb as a fox. She doesn’t know any better. She doesn’t understand the repercussions of her actions,” says Lawrence. “She chooses when to be blind to something and I know women like that. You know those women who find themselves in very dramatic situations and don’t understand why.”

And for Russell, seeing Lawrence embody someone so comically, almost defiantly, deviant was a revelation.

“We’ve never seen her do a character like this. It was alive and freeing and fun, and she brought amazing energy to it. Her peculiar madness is her genius,” Russell says. “Jennifer and I share a process on the set where we laugh and we stay loose. But when she goes in, it’s on. It’s deceptive to everyone around. She looks like she’s goofing around and not paying attention. But she goes there. Magic happens.”
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