Jennifer Lawrence says reading mother! reviews was 'not healthy'

Jennifer Lawrence had to put a pin in reading all those mother! reviews from critics — not necessarily because many were negative, but because they all resulted in what she calls an unhealthy habit.

“Normally, I promote a movie, you put the work in to promoting it, ask people to go see it, and then it’s just kind of out of your hands. I normally just kind of let it go,” Lawrence tells Adam Sandler for Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” series. “Dating the director was different.”

Lawrence recently split from her director boyfriend, Darren Aronofsky, who helmed the Oscar winner in mother! But they were together throughout the press tour for the film.

“We’d be on the tour together. I’d come back to the hotel, and the last thing I want to talk about or think about is a movie,” she says. “He comes back from the tour, and that’s all he wants to talk about and I get it. It’s his baby. He wrote it. He conceived it. He directed it. I was doing double duty trying to be a supportive partner while also being like, ‘Can I please, for the love of God, not think about mother! for one second?'”

When he started reading some of the reviews to her, she found it all unhealthy. “I finally was just like, ‘It’s not healthy. Neither of us are doing it because if I read it, I start getting defensive.’ Especially because it’s my man,” she explains. “I don’t want to sound in an interview that I’m defending what we’re doing in any way. It’s awesome, what we did. Some people hate it and the people who hate it really hate it. But it’s nothing that needs to be defended and if I read a negative review, I just feel defensive.”

Lawrence previously told EW in an interview that she wasn’t surprised by the divisive audience reaction to the film, which received the infamous F CinemaScore.

“There is no middle ground,” she said. “We knew that it was divided. That’s what [was] so exciting — everybody is going to feel something. It’s going to create a conversation. It’s going to create a controversy. Nobody is going to leave notgetting something from it.”