After a break from acting to focus on family, Jennifer Lawrence returned to the spotlight with a new lease on Hollywood—but her same approach to privacy now that she’s mom to 18-month-old son Cy.
Jennifer Lawrence didn’t have to become a mom to enjoy a good anecdote about bodily functions.
And now that she has a child, with all the goops of varying consistency that entails, the Oscar winner may just be in her element.
Not that she’s giving anyone a peek inside her diaper pail.
Despite tendencies to regale late night talk show hosts with stories of gastrointestinal distress or wetting the bed at 13, Lawrence has always been quite private when it comes to her off-camera life. And that didn’t change when she and husband Cooke Maroney welcomed son Cy in February 2022, the actress not personally confirming his arrival or name for months.
“It’s so scary to talk about motherhood,” she said in the October 2022 issue of Vogue. “Only because it’s so different for everybody. If I say, ‘It was amazing from the start,’ some people will think, It wasn’t amazing for me at first, and feel bad.”
Lawrence’s empathy has always been at the ready, her aversion to hurting anybody’s feelings or making people feel left out expressed at some point in almost every interview. But now she knows firsthand that all roads leading to motherhood are not the same—and that there’s not just one destination.
The actress, who’s celebrating her 33rd birthday Aug. 15, told E! News in 2017 that she felt her desire to become a mom was waning as she got older, those pangs decreasing in intensity from when she was 21 or 22 and she couldn’t wait.
“I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work!” she quipped.
Though her case of the shrugs could easily have been attributed to having just made the horror allegory mother!—her then-boyfriend Darren Aronofsky‘s deeply disturbing take on we’re still not sure what that doesn’t end well for mother or baby—Lawrence wasn’t yet involved with her future husband.
She met Maroney, director of Manhattan’s Gladstone 64 gallery, in 2018 through a mutual friend and he ended up suiting the star perfectly.
“He’s just the best person I’ve ever met in my whole life,” Lawrence told Entertainment Tonight about her then-fiancé in 2019, and agreeing to marry him was “a very, very easy decision.”
And that doesn’t mean she was blowing smoke when she told Diane Sawyer in 2015 that she didn’t “really plan” on getting married or otherwise was imagining her big day. Rather, all it takes is (the) one.
“I definitely wasn’t at a place where I was like ‘I’m ready to get married,'” Lawrence explained on NAKED With Catt Sadler in 2019. “I just met Cooke, and I wanted to marry him. We wanted to marry each other. We wanted to commit fully. And, you know, he’s my best friend. I feel very honored to become a Maroney.”
Since her master life plan included having children, regardless of whether she got married or not, Lawrence suspected that might help her zero in on Mr. Right one day.
“I feel like if I find that one person who I want to spend the rest of my life with, who I want to be the father of my children, that I would absolutely not f–k it up,” she told Vogue in 2015. “But I’m also not banking on that.”
So far, so good!