Jennifer Lawrence recently announced that she will be taking a year off from acting to focus on activism. Hopefully she will still be appearing on talk shows.
A few months after she filled in for Jimmy Kimmel and conducted her own delightfully weird interview with Kim Kardashian West, the actress sat down with Stephen Colbert on Monday night and delivered yet another wildly entertaining late-night performance.
Within moments of sitting down on the Late Show couch, Colbert had pulled out a hidden bottle of Cuban rum and the pair started throwing back shots together. Asked why she’s taking a year off from acting, Lawrence joked, “Because I’m so miserable.” She explained that she will still be developing projects during that time but won’t actually be on set acting so she can instead “talk to kids about, you know, corruption.”
“I’m a part of an organization [Represent.Us] that’s trying to pass the state by state legislation to get big money out of politics,” Lawrence, who recently revealed on 60 Minutes that she dropped out of middle school, explained. “When Trump got elected, my head spun off. And I read all these books and I have really learned myself good about our government.”
“So speaking about politics and corruption, you recently were ill-used in the defense of Harvey Weinstein,” Colbert said, changing the subject.
“Yes! I was!” Lawrence replied, as they both kicked off their shoes to get more comfortable. “He is just that horrible ass boil that does not go away. You pop the ass boil. He’s just the worst. When is it going to end? In the middle of the night I come up with a statement in London, and I was like, it’s still not over? The awfulness is still happening?”
Quotes from Lawrence, who won a 2013 Oscar in the Weinstein-produced Silver Linings Playbook, were recently used—along with those from Meryl Streep—by Weinstein’s lawyers to defend the disgraced movie mogul in a sexual-misconduct lawsuit. Or as Colbert put it, “He dragged you into his pile of shit.”
“Yeah, everybody does,” Lawrence said. “But I love my job and I’m very happy,” she added, giving Colbert a look that said the exact opposite. “It turns out I really like rum,” she said. “You know, I like vacation me, so why wouldn’t I like rum?”
From there, Lawrence proceeded to tell Colbert about how she spent Amy Schumer’s recent wedding flirting with Larry David. “But it was very one-sided,” she said. “I’m obsessed with Larry David, but he’s not obsessed with me.”
Asked if David knows she has a crush on him, Lawrence said, “I feel like, um, yes, but I don’t have his number and he doesn’t flirt back with me, which is just like fuel for me. That just gets me going.” In fact, the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator once discussed the crush with a different late-night host, Seth Meyers.
They didn’t get around to talking about her new movie Red Sparrow until after a break, but soon they were off on yet another tangent about their shared Southern roots. Speaking to her nieces and nephews back home in Kentucky, she looked into the camera and said, “Aunt Jen’s drunk.”