The trajectory of Jennifer Lawrence‘s career as a movie star can be gauged by the evolution of her character in the X-Men film franchise. Lawrence broke out with an Oscar-nominated performance in the film Winter’s Bone, and was soon cast in the lead role of Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise. She quickly became one of the highest-paid actresses in the world with two major franchises to her name. In the X-Men reboot series, which was launched in 2011 with X-Men: First Class, Lawrence played the shape-shifting mutant Mystique. In a recent interview with Allure, Lawrence said that she has no intention of playing the character again, and shared the biggest reason for her aversion.
Lawrence said that she experienced breaking point while sitting in the makeup chair for up to eight hours on X-Men: First Class. She ultimately played Mystique in four movies, with her blue-skinned appearance gradually being reduced with every new installment. By her final appearance, which came in the film Dark Phoenix, Mystique was killed off. Before Lawrence was cast in the role, Mystique was played by Rebecca Romijn in the original X-Men film trilogy. Romijn will play the character again after two decades in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Superhero Team Should You Join? Avengers · X-Men · Teen Titans · The Boys
Every team is a personality test with a uniform. One saves the world and argues about it the whole way home. One has been fighting for the right to exist since the day it formed. One is still working out who it is while the fighting happens. And one has no powers at all, plus no intention of playing fair. Eight questions decide where you actually belong.
🛡️Avengers(Marvel Studios)
🧬X-Men(Marvel)
🐦Teen Titans(DC)
💊The Boys(Prime Video)
01
What kind of power would you actually want? The power matters less than what you would be willing to do with it.
02
Why join a team at all? Nobody puts on the suit for the reason they say out loud.
03
How do you feel about the people in charge? Every team has a chain of command. Very few of them survive contact.
04
What is your role inside a group? Every roster needs the same handful of people to function.
05
How do you win a fight you should lose? This is the scene the entire film gets built around.
06
What is this work costing you? Nobody does this for free. The bill just arrives differently for everyone.
07
How should the world see your team? Half of this job is public relations, and everybody knows it.
08
The offer arrives. What makes you say yes? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your team.
Recruitment Is Complete Your Team Is…
Four teams, four completely different reasons to put yourself in danger
for strangers. This is the roster you actually belong on, what they would want from you, and what it
would cost you to stay.
Marvel Studios · The Avengers · Since 2012
The Avengers
You belong where the stakes are largest and the personalities are
loudest. This is a team of people who are all used to being the most important person in the
room, which is exactly why it works and exactly why it keeps nearly falling apart.
The Avengers are not friends who became a team. They are a team that slowly and
reluctantly became friends, and you would recognise every stage of that process.
You can hold your own among big egos without needing to win every exchange, which is the
real entry requirement here.
The arguing is part of the method. This group does its best thinking mid-disagreement,
usually at volume, usually in a very expensive building.
When the sky opens, they are who shows up. You would want to be standing in that line.
Marvel · X-Men · Since 1963
The X-Men
You have never had the luxury of being thanked for this. The
X-Men protect a world that has never once been comfortable with them existing, and something
in you understands exactly why they keep doing it anyway.
This is the only team on the list whose central conflict is not a villain. It is being
wanted gone by the same people they keep saving.
You know what it is to be the outsider in a room and to decide, anyway, that you will
not make yourself smaller so everyone else is comfortable.
The X-Men are the most genuine found family in comics. People arrive with nowhere else
to go and are never once asked to explain themselves.
You would not be joining for the glory. There has never been any.
DC · Teen Titans · Since 1964
The Teen Titans
You do not want colleagues, you want your people. The Titans are
the team where the friendship came first and the world-saving turned up afterwards as an
inconvenient side effect.
Every Titan is somebody’s sidekick who decided to stop being one. That decision, not the
villain of the week, is what the team is actually about.
You would be joining people who are all working themselves out at the same time as you,
which is far less lonely than being the only one.
The Titans lose regularly. Then they eat together and come back better, which is a more
honest model of growing up than any other team here manages.
The tower would be loud, chaotic, and the first place that ever felt like yours.
Prime Video · The Boys · Since 2019
The Boys
You are not asking who to trust. You worked out the answer a
while ago and it was nobody in a cape. This is where you go once you have decided the people
in charge need watching, and that nobody else is going to do it.
The Boys have no powers, no mandate and no funding. What they have is leverage,
patience, and a very high tolerance for consequences.
You are the person in the room who notices the thing everybody else has quietly agreed
not to mention.
This is not a heroic team and it has never pretended otherwise. It is a group of damaged
people doing necessary work in ways nobody would call clean.
You would not sleep well. You would keep going anyway.
Jennifer Lawrence Isn’t Sitting in a Makeup Chair for 8 Hours Again
Shutting down her chances of pulling a Tobias Fünke again, Lawrence told Allure, “I learned how little sleep I can operate on and what can happen to the human mind when you’ve actually reached your breaking point. And patience! My favorite part of playing Mystique was the stunts. It was so fun to train in that way and learn how to move. I had the same stunt double, Renee Moneymaker, who was Katniss. She is one of my best friends, so that was great. My least favorite part was most certainly the paint.” In addition to X-Men: First Class and Dark Phoenix, Lawrence also played Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse. The X-Men film franchise is being rebooted by Marvel Studios, and while the central cast has already been announced, there’s no word on who will play Mystique. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
