Jennifer Lawrence Sparks Backlash Over Comments On Female-Led Action Movies

Is There Some Truth To Jennifer Lawrence’s Statements About Female-Action Leads ?

After a discussion with Viola Davis published by Variety, Jennifer Lawrence sparked outrage and debates over her comments in regards to claims that "nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie" before her role in "The Hunger Games." Users took to Twitter to express their frustration with the actresses comments, reminding her of examples such as Sigourney Weaver and other female action icons. Meanwhile, instead of attacking the actress others dug a little deeper into her comments and debated that there is some truth to what the Hunger Games actress tried to say.

The comments originated from a nearly 45-minute sit down the actress had with Oscar-winning actress and producer Viola Davis (How To Get Away With Murder, The Woman King). The two actresses discussed acting, Juilliard, inequality in the industry, motherhood, amongst other topics. Lawrence talked about the significance of her role playing the protagonist Katniss Everdeen in "The Hunger Games,” (2012-2015) the popular science-fiction franchise based on The Hunger Games trilogy of novels by the American author Suzanne Collins. "I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work — because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead."

Lawrence went on to say, "It just makes me so happy every single time I see a movie come out that just blows through every one of those beliefs, and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies."

Critics quickly took to social media to counter Lawrence’s comments tearing down the 32 year old actress noting several other women who have starred as leads in action films. — “including Sigourney Weaver in the "Alien" films, Angelina Jolie in "Salt" and "Tomb Raider," Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill: Volume 1" and "Kill Bill: Volume 2; and Michelle Yeoh in several films, among them "Supercop," "Magnificent Warriors" and “Yes, Madam!”

Meanwhile, others said that while Lawrence's comment was technically incorrect, that she did accurately point out a larger issue of gender bias in Hollywood. Franklin Leonar, The Black List founder, Film & TV producer, and Contributing Editor at Variety Fair chimed in with his take, "It is untrue that no one had ever put a woman in an action movie before Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games," he said on Twitter. "It is absolutely true that Hollywood had and has a real bias against women driven action movies because of this ridiculous belief about who identifies with whom."

Could what Lawrence said have been worded better, absolutely. It can be argued that she misspoke and it’s being overblown. The debate to be had is that although these were all iconic female centric films, they weren’t marketing to teenage girls. Was the specific context that she was referring to about the mid-00s and YA action films. Does Sigourney Weaver technically count as the lead actor and was the Alien franchise marketed as a strong female centric film?