Jennifer Lawrence rose to fame as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games film franchise, but her career could have taken a different path had she landed one big audition.
The Oscar winner recently revealed during an appearance on Spotify’s The Rewatchables”= podcast that she had auditioned for a role in Twilight.
“I auditioned for Twilight,” she said in the interview earlier this month. “They turned me down immediately. I didn’t even get a callback. But my life would’ve been totally different. I got Hunger Games, I think, like, a year later.”
But Lawrence said she almost didn’t accept the offer to play Katniss after witnessing the level of “fandom” surrounding the Twilight movies and its stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner.
The first Twilight film premiered in 2008, and the final installment, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2, was released in 2012. The first Hunger Games movie premiered in 2012.
“I almost didn’t do Hunger Games because Twilight had come out and that fandom had happened,” she said, adding that she was concerned that Hunger Games would bring a similar “level of fame.”
“I just assumed it was going to be like Twilight— the Twilight level of fame, and that was just never something I had in mind,” she said. “I wanted to do indies, I wanted to do good films, but I didn’t want to be the most famous person on the planet. That’s a very different life than what I pictured for myself.”
Lawrence added that she would have been “miserable” had she endured the media frenzy and tabloid fodder the Twilight actors dealt with while making the vampire film saga.
Clearly, Lawrence’s casting in The Hunger Games film franchise was meant to be.
The No Hard Feelings actor told Variety in an article published earlier this month that she would “totally” return to the film franchise if given an opportunity.
“If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent,” she said.
Lawrence starred in all four Hunger Games installments from 2012 to 2015. She will not appear in an upcoming sequel for the franchise, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.