Courtesy Harper’s Bazaar / Ben Hassett Before she battled tyranny as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence had to battle Hollywood bullies.
Gracing the November cover of Harper's Bazaar U.K., which hits newsstands on Thursday, the Oscar winner revealed that she was often harangued over her weight during her early years in show business.
"I was young. It was just the kind of s--t that actresses have to go through," Lawrence, now 23, told the magazine (via Just Jared). "Somebody told me I was fat, that I was going to get fired if I didn't lose a certain amount of weight. They brought in pictures of me where I was basically naked, and told me to use them as motivation for my diet. It was just that."
With her delicate baby face and curvy figure, the Kentucky native didn't exactly fit the stick-figure profile we're used to seeing from Tinseltown these days when she appeared as a teen in such films as The Poker House and The Burning Plain before gaining acclaim for 2010's Winter's Bone.
Just because she's become a superstar by toplining a mega-successful franchise and winning a Best Actress Academy Award for Silver Linings Playbook, that doesn't mean Lawrence has forgotten how she was treated by image-obsessed folks in the industry.
"[Someone brought up] that because of the way my career had gone, it wouldn't still hurt me. That somehow, after I won an Oscar, I'm above it all. 'You really still care about that?' Yeah. I was a little girl. I was hurt," said J.Law in no uncertain terms. "It doesn't matter what accolades you get. I know it'll never happen to me again. If anybody even tries to whisper the word 'diet,' I'm like, 'You can go f--k yourself."
Lawrence started filming the third The Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay—Part 1, in Georgia last week. She'll next be back on the big screen when the second installment, Catching Fire, is released on Nov. 22.
And she's set to reprise her role as Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past, hitting theaters next May.
Lawrence's full interview appears in the November issue of Harper's Bazaar U.K. on sale Oct. 3. It's also available as a digital edition.