Jennifer Lawrence Talks Life, Catching Fire and Celebrity With USA Today

Jennifer Lawrence has two articles in USA Today in which she talks about the price of fame, The Hunger Games franchise and being a mama-cat to her kittens, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth. 

Read on from USA Today:

Away from the awards-season hubbub, which again envelopes her for her role as a foxy yet foolish wife in American Hustle, Lawrence is a self-aware woman trying to have some version of a regular existence. "I've built my career. I need to build my human life. I need to get a house and connect to the people around me and not work for a little while," she says.

Topping her to-do list: buying a home when she wraps the two-part Hunger Games franchise finale, Mockingjay, which shoots until June.

But for now, she does her best to retain some sense of routine in an existence that's mostly lived in hotels, fueled by room service. Her on-again boyfriend, Nicholas Hoult, helps keep her sane, away from prying eyes. "We're really good at it," she says of maintaining their under-the-radar romance.

She's infatuated with her two young nephews, whom she FaceTimes every night. She decompresses by watching reality TV, in particular Keeping Up with the Kardashians. And she keeps her best-actress Oscar, won for last year's Silver Linings Playbook, at her mom's house to avoid any weirdness when friends come over, to try to nip in the bud the possibility of people standing at attention around her.

"I just get allergic to that kind of thing. People treating you differently when you don't feel any differently is really alienating. You can see, the way they look at you. I can see if that was who I surrounded myself with, that's why you change," she says. "I find people who don't change. That's where I get my reality."

And her ability to say exactly the right thing at the right time? It's a gift. "She's an amazing study of people. She really understands the teeniest differences in people. She can read people in a second," says The Hunger Games: Catching Fire director Francis Lawrence. "She can figure you out in an instant. She does it with such ease, from the gut."

Read more after the jump!

Work can be your salvation, your port in a mad, mad celebrity storm. Just ask Jennifer Lawrence, who finds solace and consistency on movie sets, surrounded by people who don't care about her latest sultry Dior ads, or whether her new haircut is too extreme.

"Nobody treats you any differently. They see celebrities all the time. Especially on The Hunger Games, people have known each other for years. I feel like myself," she says.

Her first day back on set, one day after winning an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, Lawrence earned a standing ovation from her Hunger Games: Catching Fire cast and crew.

"And then, nothing changed. We shot two more weeks in the mud. When she messes up her lines, she gets teased by Woody (Harrelson) that she's going to have to give her award back," says Fire director Francis Lawrence. "She's smart and goofy and silly and talented and endearing. It's all of those things. There isn't an actress around like her right now. She has an intuitive talent for acting, but also a soul and gravitas that most girls her age don't have. She captures the loneliness of Katniss."

The reality is, despite her tendency to deflate any hysteria around her with a well-timed and endlessly requoted quip, Lawrence isn't a well-oiled wit machine. She seems confident and gregarious, if a bit anxious and tightly wound, at finding herself in a very abnormal situation where she has to talk about herself all the time, especially while promoting The Hunger Games blockbusters. She jokes, half-seriously, that she feels responsible if people don't see the films.

"There's a nervous quality about her. Her attention shifts quite easily. I think that she seems to jump around from thing to thing to thing. Some people see it as being on, but it's just a part of personality. She is always paying attention. She soaks up everything. She can read a room, a person, a vibe, in a second. It totally affects her," says Francis Lawrence.

She worries that one day, the media gauntlet will be her new normal, and she gets especially twitchy when photographers scream her full name at her at premieres, something that reminds her of getting in trouble as kid. "A lot of times, I don't have answers to the questions. I just have to give you something," she says. "It's weird anytime you're having a totally one-sided conversation. But I don't know, it's gotten pretty normal. I'll probably end up being very self-centered. But I still don't enjoy it."

Russell says that Lawrence has stayed "the same person. Everything around her has changed. The fame has enveloped her but she's stayed true to her self. ... She's a real person. Her saving grace is that there's a humbleness to her."

Most of all, Lawrence retains a well-honed, if wry, sense of humor when talking about the craziness that seems to be part and parcel of her massive level of celebrity. One lesson she's learned: Don't go out wearing hats, because they only draw more attention to you. She loses herself in "(expletive) reality TV. Waking up in full makeup — and I still believe it. I'm still like, 'Khloe, be careful,'" says Lawrence, who says the story lines of Keeping Up with the Kardashians permeated even a recent health scare involving abdominal pains and a hospital visit. "I was under anesthesia yesterday. I had to get one of those endoscopic things only to find out that I'm fine. When I became lucid, the first conversation I was having was about the Kardashians."

She's found ways to sneak out and be an actual human being, doing stuff other people do away from prying lenses. "I go to the driving range. I don't play golf. You can just drink beer and walk around outside. You're outside and hitting balls and drinking beer. It's fun. I get it now. When I'm in Atlanta, no one expects to see me at a random driving range in Atlanta, so it's OK," she says of being on location for The Hunger Games.

Speaking of Hunger Games, is she going to miss her iconic warrior Katniss Everdeen when the series is done?

"I'm not so sure about just Katniss as (much as) the whole of the people. And my boys. Look at my boys," she says, whipping out her iPhone to show a photo of her cuddling with Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson. "Wait, I have a message so you can't see. I'm going to miss that. My angels. I'm mama cat and they're my kittens."

Read the other USA Today article in it's entirety HERE.