Actress Jennifer Lawrence’s Die My Love taught her how to give herself grace as a mum and wife

LOS ANGELES – Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence hopes her new film – in which she plays a mother grappling with postpartum depression – encourages mums to give themselves more grace.

Opening in Singapore cinemas on Dec 18 and directed by Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay (We Need To Talk About Kevin, 2011), Die My Love

follows a young woman (Lawrence) whose identity and relationship with her husband (Robert Pattinson)

begin unravelling after the birth of their first child.

Lawrence, who won a Best Actress Oscar for the romantic comedy-drama Silver Linings Playbook (2012), says the role has changed her outlook on being a wife and mother.

Speaking at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in November, the 35-year-old American actress – who is getting major Oscar buzz for this performance and is nominated for a Golden Globe – believes the story adds much-needed nuance to discussions of postpartum depression, “something that I think our society has misunderstood”.

Postpartum depression is not just one thing, she explains.

“We have an idea of it – you don’t connect with your kid, or you have a really loud kid and you’re not sleeping – and sometimes it’s not like that at all.

“Sometimes, you feel like you’re the only thing wrong in the situation. Or he’s the only thing wrong,” says the star, who is married to American art gallery director Cooke Maroney, 41. They have two sons, aged three years and nine months.

Lawrence also hopes this psychological drama, which is based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz, encourages mothers to forgive and have compassion for themselves.

Told that one viewer felt, after watching Die My Love, that she should give herself more grace as a mum, the actress – who starred in The Hunger Games dystopian franchise (2012 to present) and played mutant Mystique in the X-Men superhero films (2011 to 2019) – says: “I’m really happy to hear that.

“I think the day that I give myself grace is going to be a huge moment of growth for me – when I stop attacking myself and actually recognise that I’m working hard.

“That’s going to be nice. Maybe it’ll happen. I think it will.”

She and Pattinson, 39, found they could easily relate to their characters because they are both new parents themselves.

English actor Pattinson – best known for playing a vampire in The Twilight Saga film series (2008 to 2012) and the title role in superhero blockbuster The Batman (2022) – has a one-year-old daughter with fiancee Suki Waterhouse, a 33-year-old English model and actress.

“Rob and I were new parents and we’re both partners so, obviously, there was a lot of fertile ground for discussion,” Lawrence says.

The pair fully understood “what happens when you’re really tired and you’re having these arguments, which was helpful”.

But they found it especially challenging to be in tense scenes involving the baby girls who play their daughter.

“The idea of holding the twins... and them reaching for our faces or looking into our eyes for a reaction, and us stonewalling, was unthinkable,” Lawrence says.

So they made sure the babies felt loved at all times, and took time to get to know them off camera.

“Their mum and I would always laugh about how they were having the best day of their life. They got so much attention and they were played with,” Lawrence recalls.

To portray their characters’ fraying marriage, the two actors modelled the opposite of everything going right in their relationships.

“Because Rob and I are both in, I think, very healthy relationships, it was easy for us to turn that on its head and work backwards on what would demolish this couple, and what that would look like,” Lawrence says.

But the characters’ disagreements made her realise how vital it is to apologise.

“I became so aware of how important ‘I’m sorry’ is, because I was doing the opposite (as this character).

“I, Jennifer, as a wife and someone responsible for somebody’s feelings, would just be, like, ‘Oh God, she’s got to say sorry at some point.’

“It made me really aware of how much that can change the course of something.”

Die My Love opens in Singapore cinemas on Dec 18.