Jennifer Lawrence Admits Why She Stopped Talking About Donald Trump

Jennifer Lawrence is reconsidering how vocal she wants to be about politics as former President Donald Trump begins his second term.

In a conversation with The New York Times for the Nov. 1 episode of The Interview podcast, the 35-year-old actress admitted she feels uncertain about speaking out this time around.

“I don’t really know if I should,” Lawrence said when asked if she planned to be as outspoken as she was during Trump’s first term. “The first Trump administration was so wild — it felt like, how can we let this stand? I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off.”

She added that she’s since realized celebrity opinions rarely influence elections. “As we’ve learned election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for,” she said. “So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart. We are so divided.”

The Oscar winner previously said she endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, noting that “abortion is literally on the ballot.”

Lawrence explained that she now wants to let her work, rather than her words, express her values. “I want to protect my craft so that you can still get lost in what I’m doing,” she said. “If I can’t say something that speaks to peace or lowering the temperature or offering a solution, I don’t want to be part of the problem. I don’t want to make the problem worse.”

While she’s stepped back from publicly discussing Trump, Lawrence hopes her professional projects still reflect her political perspective. Her production company, Excellent Cadaver, has released documentaries tackling issues such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the abortion ban in Texas. “A lot of movies coming out from my production company are expressions of the political landscape,” she said of the documentaries Bread and Roses and Zurawski v. Texas. “That’s how I feel like I can be helpful.”

Looking back, Lawrence admitted she “probably” regrets some of her comments from Trump’s first term but said his second term “feels different.”

“Because he said what he was going to do,” she explained. “We knew what he did for four years. He was very clear. And that’s what we chose.”

Before Trump’s first term, she told Entertainment Weekly in 2015 that his election would mean “the end of the world.” After his victory, she said she felt “helpless, scared, and devastated,” and turned to educating herself as a response.

By 2020, she shared on the Absolutely Not podcast that she “grew up Republican” but “changed everything” when Trump was elected.

Ahead of the 2024 election, she again encouraged civic engagement, saying, “Take action by voting. The most important thing that we can do right now is just vote.”