Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t hold back when it comes to her troubling experiences with Hollywood’s “toxic masculinity,” especially during her time working with director Bryan Singer.
Appearing at a panel discussion with The Hollywood Reporter last week, Lawrence talked about his latest film, “Causeway,” an AppleTV+ drama about a soldier readjusting to his life in New Orleans after suffering a severe brain injury in Afghanistan.
The actor praised director Lila Neugebauer’s working environment, calling her one of the “calmest and best decision makers I’ve ever worked with” and said any on-set misunderstandings between the cast and crew were resolved amicably.
“It was incredible not being around toxic masculinity. Let me take a little break,” Lawrence said. “And it always made us laugh about how we ended up saying, ‘Women shouldn’t be in these kinds of roles because we get so emotional.’ I mean, I worked with Bryan Singer. I saw emotional men. I’ve seen the biggest hissy fits thrown on set.”
“I really enjoy working with female directors,” she added.
Singer, who directed Lawrence in three “X-Men” films, has kept a low profile after being accused of sexual misconduct and assault by at least four underage boys. Many of the claims came to light as part of a lengthy 2019 investigation by The Atlantic, which Singer later called a “homophobic smear piece.”
A few months after the article was published, Singer agreed to pay one of the accusers $150,000 to settle the lawsuit. However, he maintained his innocence through a lawyer and called the decision “pure business” in a statement to Variety.
Lawrence, an Oscar winner for 2012’s “Silver Linings Playbook,” isn’t the first Hollywood celebrity to look back on her time with Singer in a less than favorable light. “Bryan is not the easiest guy to work with,” Halle Berry told Variety in 2020. “Sometimes I would be very angry with him. I argued with him, said some bad words out of sheer frustration.”
Rami Malek, who worked with Singer on the Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” felt the same way. “In my situation with Bryan, it wasn’t pleasant,” she told Vanity Fair in 2019. “It wasn’t at all.”
If Lawrence gets her way, there will be more films directed by women in the future.
“There were no major fights,” he told The Hollywood Reporter of his time working on his new film. “We disagreed and listened to each other. Sometimes I was wrong and I learned that I was wrong, sometimes I was right.”
