This fan-favorite actress started her career when she was just 16 years old, before quickly becoming one of the most humorous and relatable stars in Hollywood. Does Jennifer Lawrence know archery, like one of the most well-known characters she plays?
Jennifer Lawrence can shoot a bow. She learned archery in preparation for playing Katniss Everdeen in the movie adaptations of The Hunger Games books, a young adult dystopian series by the author Suzanne Collins.
Read on to find out more about how Lawrence learned archery, how realistic her shooting is according to skilled archers, and what else she’s learned in preparation for other roles.
Lawrence the Archer
After watching the Hunger Games movies, based on Suzanne Collins’s dystopian trilogy, it’s natural to wonder if Jennifer Lawrence, who played Katniss Everdeen, the main character and skilled archer of the series, knows how to shoot a bow herself. As one fan posted in a Tweet, “I want to believe Jennifer Lawrence is a good archer in real life.”
There is good news for those fans, as Lawrence did learn archery while getting ready to play Katniss. She reportedly trained with the Olympic archer and medalist Khatuna Lorig, who has competed for the Soviet Union and the United States after becoming a naturalized citizen.
Lorig was interviewed after working with Lawrence on her archery skill. “Jennifer was a very fast learner and a good listener too,” Lorig said. “She has a fun personality and was easy to work with every day. She was good at acting like she had been shooting for years.”
Lawrence made Lorig proud with her on-screen skill. As Lorig said, “[I]t was weird too because I kept thinking, ‘Hey! I gave her that technique!’” Other skilled archers have weighed in on how realistic Lawrence’s technique is in the movies.
The consensus was that her training with Lorig paid off, and while she would do better to draw the bowstring back slower and in knocking her arrows, and probably shouldn’t keep her index finger over the top of the arrow while aiming, Lawrence’s portrayal of archery in the movies was realistic and very near spot on.
No matter what experts say about her technique, many archers are excited that the movies have brought more attention to the sport. “I’m really thankful,” Lorig said of the new attention towards archery. “The audience loves to watch archery because it’s such a unique sport.”
“Age, height, and gender don’t matter; you can always have fun with it. All you need is skill and it’s great because you can go and pick up a bow and arrow anywhere, you don’t need to have a permit to go shoot at an archery range,” she finished.
Check out the YouTube video below to watch Jennifer Lawrence teaching Diane Sawyer, a television journalist, how to shoot a bow.
From Archer to Ballerina
Archery isn’t the only thing that Lawrence learned for a role. To play Dominika Egorova, a former ballerina turned intelligence agent in the spy thriller film Red Sparrow, which was released in 2018, Lawrence had to learn ballet.
On the project were Justin Peck, a renowned choreographer and dancer, Lawrence’s dance partner and actor, dancer, and model, Sergei Polunin, and her dance double, Isabella Boylston. Lawrence went through months of training for four hours, five days a week with her ballet teacher, Kurt Froman, and became a credible ballerina.
As soon as they began filming, Froman reported that “she performed exactly the quality of work that we had rehearsed. It didn’t all go out the window because of nerves.” Polunin, her partner, even said that Lawrence had “a ballerina’s energy,” describing it as “the muscle compression and wanting to be perfect.”
No matter what her newest role is or what she has to do to prepare for it, Lawrence is dedicated to fully embodying her characters.