Jennifer Lawrence Says First Commercial Job Was an Ad for MTV’s ‘Super Sweet 16’

Jennifer Lawrence had an unexpected start to her Hollywood career.

While recounting her first acting gigs with Leonardo DiCaprio on Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Lawrence, 35, revealed that one of her first bookings consisted of an appearance in a commercial for a popular reality show in the early 2000s.

“I did an MTV promo for My Super Sweet 16,” she recalled. “I’m being carried on a chaise lounge and then they drop me.”

“But were you in the show?” DiCaprio, 51, inquired, to which she responded, “No, I didn’t have the money. It was a promo for the show, playing a fictional rich girl having an over-the-top birthday party.”

The Hunger Games star also shared that she began acting at the age of 14 in New York before booking a primary role on the sitcom The Bill Engvall Show. Two years later, she landed her breakout role in 2010’s Winter’s Bone. 

DiCaprio — who said he began acting at the age of 12 — said he had a similar start, having starred on Growing Pains before he got his first big break in the 1993 film This Boy’s Life. He shared that he also starred in commercials, including a Matchbox car commercial where he “played a gangster with slicked back hair.”

Both actors were eventually able to move on to bigger projects. For Lawrence, she went on to garner worldwide attention with her role in The Hunger Games. However, she revealed in the interview that she believes that it was director David O. Russell — her director in 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook and 2013’s American Hustle — who “taught me how to act, really.”

“I want to be sensitive to the other actors who’ve worked with him. I know he’s tough,” Lawrence shared. “He can be really, really hard on people. For me, I don’t know if it was because I grew up doing sports, and so I felt like he was just a stern coach.”

“‘Do it loud,’ ‘Do it quieter,’ ‘That was bulls—,’ ‘That was bad,’ ‘Do it better,’ ” she recalled of Russell’s directions. “He was very straightforward with me. I was 21 when I did Silver Linings [Playbook] and it felt alive. I never felt like he was yelling at me. I really don’t like being tiptoed around, like I’m an emotional landmine. I hate that.”

Lawrence also revealed one of her acting secrets — which she also considered a “bad habit” — “letting go at the end of the day.” She said that she often doesn’t think about what she’s doing in her scenes for the next day until it comes, “and then it’s a mad scramble in the hair and makeup trailer.”

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“It’s great for my life. It makes me not go crazy, but the next morning is hell,” she explained. 

With Silver Linings, I had a scene where I’m just yelling nothing but sports stats to [Robert] De Niro and it’s obviously hard to memorize. It’s just numbers and sports, which I don’t care about. I didn’t know that I had to do that until the day of, and it’s Robert De Niro and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to f—— waste Robert de Niro’s time.’ So that’s an example of a really bad thing to do,” she added.