One Hard Thing About Filming Red Sparrow, According To Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence in Red Sparrow

From playing Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games film series to mother in Darren Aronofsky's movie of the same, Jennifer Lawrence has played many different roles since her acting career. Her next movie, Red Sparrow, sees her portraying a Russian spy named Dominika Egorova, who has been trained to use seduction to complete her objectives. What made Red Sparrow more challenging that some of her other roles, though, was having to pull off a convincing Russian accent. In fact, this movie marked Lawrence's first time using a foreign accent at all. The actress said:

I've never done a foreign accent before. It was daunting and scary but I hope we pulled it off.

It's hard enough being the lead in a movie, TV show or play, but to have to use a foreign accent while playing the character, and a convincing one at that, can be extremely difficult. American actors have especially had trouble with playing Russian characters, so even though Jennifer Lawrence is one of Hollywood's most talented actresses right now, it sounds like it was still a difficult endeavor. We'll have to wait until Red Sparrow hits theaters in a few weeks to see how the full performance turned out, but as she said later in her interview with ET Online, she doesn't want to go to into detail about how she handled the Russian accent until everyone can watch the Francis Lawrence-directed movie. She continued:

I don't want to talk about the accent until the movie comes out because I don't want to say, 'I did this and I did that, and it was really quite easy for me,' and then just get annihilated.

Jennifer Lawrence wasn't the only performer in Red Sparrow who had to speak differently. Her co-star, Joel Edgerton, plays CIA agent Nathaniel Nash, requiring him to set aside his Australian accent for the project. Unlike Lawrence, though, Edgerton already had experience playing Americans, such as in The Great Gatsby and Black Mass, so it was familiar territory for him. Going back to Lawrence, another challenge that she had to deal with on Red Sparrow was learning ballet, as Dominika Egorova is a ballerina before she's recruited to be a spy. Granted, you won't see Lawrence performing Swan Lake or anything like that, but going through four months of training was a good character study. Between the Russian accent and the ballet training, as well as having to appear nude for a particular scene, it certainly sounds like Red Sparrow will go down as one of Lawrence's more eventful productions.

Red Sparrow will be released in theaters on march 2, but early reactions to the movie have already poured in. If you're interested in learning what other movies are coming out this year (like X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which will see Jennifer Lawrence playing Mystique for the fourth time), head over to our 2018 release schedule.

Adam Holmes
Senior Content Producer

Connoisseur of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, MonsterVerse and Doctor Who lore, Adam is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend. He started working for the site back in late 2014 writing exclusively comic book movie and TV-related articles, and along with branching out into other genres, he also made the jump to editing. Along with his writing and editing duties, as well as interviewing creative talent from time to time, he also oversees the assignment of movie-related features. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism, and he’s been sourced numerous times on Wikipedia. He's aware he looks like Harry Potter and Clark Kent.