by Nadia Cohen
CHAPTER SIX
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
Just as her fame sky-rocketed almost overnight, Jennifer’s fees shot up at a meteoric pace as soon as her film career started blossoming in 2010. She was only paid a scale rate for her role in the low-budget movie Winter’s Bone, and because she went on to receive an Oscar nomination for that film, many people then criticised her relatively modest – considering how the movie went on to gross more than $691 million – $500,000 pay for the first Hunger Games instalment in 2012. But after the first film proved such a massive hit, Jennifer’s army of managers and agents were able to negotiate a staggering $10 million for the sequel.
Suddenly she had unprecedented power in Hollywood, studio bosses were fighting over her, and her team were able to call all the shots. Jennifer has never wanted to talk about money or finances herself, so she is happy to leave it to the experts, who are sharply aware of her worth.
From the moment she was cast as Katniss Everdeen, Jennifer has been commanding huge pay cheques, as movie lovers, critics and industry experts alike all agree that having her name above the title of the film almost certainly guarantees success, but luckily money has never been massively important to the actress, who has garnered a reputation for being very careful not to waste her cash. Like her parents, she spends it wisely, and sensibly saves most of her earnings in a variety of lucrative investment schemes. Jennifer is rarely seen splashing her cash around on spending sprees, unlike many stars in her position. She has no interest in designer clothes or sports cars, and she prefers going home to visit her family when she has a rare few days off, rather than checking into lavish holiday resorts.
Her parents were comfortably off, but Gary and Karen worked hard for their money and never wasted it. As a result, Jennifer credits her close-knit family with keeping her feet firmly planted on the ground. ‘I was raised to have value for money, to have respect for money, even though you have a lot of it,’ she told Fabulous magazine in 2014. ‘My family is not the kind of family that would ever let me turn into an asshole or anything like that, so I am fortunate to have them.’
Since she started to earn megabucks, Jennifer has become well known for her charity work and going out of her way to support a variety of worthwhile causes whenever she can. In recent years she has joined campaigns to help stamp out bullying, poverty and hunger. She also donates to a wide variety of philanthropic charities supporting the creative arts.
Then there are the causes she supports through her own charitable trust, the Jennifer Lawrence Foundation, including a fund at the Community Foundation of Louisville, DoSomething.org, Feeding America, Screen Actors Guild Foundation and the Thirst Project.
In 2012, Jennifer also starred in a promotional film for Bellewood Home for Children, a non-profit agency that has been caring for abused, neglected and homeless youths in Kentucky since 1849. In the video, she talked about the need for strong public support for the home.
And, along with her Hunger Games co-stars and producers, she teamed up with the World Food Program and Feeding America to raise awareness about hunger around the world. She, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth filmed a video to encourage the public to learn more about the widespread problem, urging viewers to donate money too.
Jennifer also hosted an advance screening of Catching Fire for Hunger Games fans in her hometown of Louisville, with all the proceeds from ticket sales – which were $125 each – going to St Mary’s Centre, an organisation that supports teens and adults with intellectual disabilities. The event raised more than $40,000 for the cause, which remains close to her heart. She also hosted a special screening for Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, also in Louisville, to benefit Boys and Girls Clubs of Kentuckiana, an out-of-school care provider which offers a safe place for youngsters to spend time.
She mentioned in an interview that it was her longstanding friendship with a boy with Down’s syndrome –her childhood pal, Andy Strunk – that had inspired her to do something, and to get involved with organisations like the St Mary’s Centre. Of Andy, she said ‘He has the kindest heart of anyone I have ever met and is one of the funniest people I have ever been around.’
In addition to becoming an ambassador for Chideo, the charity-broadcasting network, Jennifer also agreed to contribute exclusive content for the network, as well as teaming up with fellow actor Bradley Cooper to host one lucky winner and a guest at the premiere of their most recent film, Serena. Fans had to donate $10 or more to their chosen causes to be in with a chance of winning the prize.
Jennifer also made a charity video saying she would be fine if she got Ebola, the highly infectious and often fatal disease which swept West Africa in 2014 – a shocking message designed to grab the viewer’s attention. In the film she points out that as an American she would be lucky enough to receive treatment, and encourages her fellow countrymen to focus more on West Africans, who are far more likely to die from the dreaded virus because cures are not available to them.
The Oscar-winning actress had teamed up with her fellow stars from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 once again for the two-minute online public service announcement from the Ebola Survival Fund. The video opens with a montage of clips from breathless US television news coverage of the handful of Ebola cases that have so far been reported in the United States. It then points out that none of the eight American patients treated for Ebola in US hospitals have died, while in some parts of West Africa only two out of every ten cases survive.
‘A lot of them didn’t make it,’ said Jennifer, to which her co-star, Josh Hutcherson, replied: ‘They didn’t have a lot to begin with.’
‘In Liberia, they had fifty doctors for 4.4 million people,’ Hutcherson continued, before telling Jennifer: ‘I know what would happen if you got Ebola.’
‘I’d be fine,’ she solemnly replied.
Liam Hemsworth, Julianne Moore and Jeffrey Wright also appeared in the hard-hitting video. But the core message came from Harvard medical professor and Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, renowned for his work in developing healthcare in poor countries. Ebola patients in West Africa, he said, urgently needed IV fluids, electrolytes, food and ‘many more well-trained West African medical professionals’.
Farmer added: ‘With high-quality supportive care, the great majority of people in West Africa will survive Ebola.’
Around the same time, another posse of stars, including Ben Affleck, Bono, Vincent Cassel, Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, also came together for an Ebola video sponsored by the ONE Campaign.
Apart from her charity work, Jennifer has admitted that she found her newly acquired wealth so strange she struggled to spend it at first, and rarely seemed to part with more than was strictly necessary. Until quite recently she continued to live in the same three-bedroom apartment she moved into when she first arrived in Hollywood, and although she could easily have afforded any mansion that caught her eye, it took years for her to be persuaded to make the move into a bigger place.
And unlike most A-listers, she does not have an army of staff. While there are people to manage her career decisions and work commitments, Jennifer does not see the point in hiring a team of personal assistants to do her shopping and she is very rarely found flexing her credit card in exclusive designer stores just for the sake of it – in fact she admits she loves finding a bargain just like anybody else and has been seen at holiday sales.
‘I still look for bargains when I go to the market,’ she admitted in an interview. ‘What I am doing now is allowing someone to park my car, but for that I have to pay four bucks.’
Of course she uses valet parking when out and about in Los Angeles, since she is so busy, but she compensates by driving an economical car. While other stars rush out to spend their pay cheques on flashy Bentleys and Ferraris, Jennifer still owns the same Volkswagen that she has been driving for years, although since her Best Actress win for Silver Linings Playbook, she has also been spotted in a new Chevy Volt. With a $39,000 price tag, it
is still about ten times cheaper than the kind of supercars she could easily afford, if she wanted to.
She has often spoken about how she cannot imagine wasting lots of money on frivolous purchases – she refuses to fork out for overpriced snacks in hotel minibars, for example. Being sensible with money is so ingrained in her lifestyle that she ended up apologetically admitting that a $500 order of Gummy Bears while hanging out with four-times Grammy Award winning rocker and Hunger Games co-star Lenny Kravitz had, in fact, been an accidental purchase.
However, Jennifer is loyal to those she feels she can trust, and is always very generous with her close circle of friends – as mentioned earlier, she took one of her best friends, Laura Simpson, to the Oscars in 2013. Once there they got very drunk and yelled at Brad Pitt. ‘Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were, like, two feet away from my table,’ she explained. ‘And it changes you. Like, I have heart palpitations. They should be King and Queen of America. I would pay taxes to them and not even think twice about it.’
Jennifer is still best buddies with people from her high school, rather than befriending those who only want to be seen with her because she is famous now. Indeed she shrugs off people who try to get to know her because of her celebrity status. ‘I just get allergic to that kind of thing,’ she told USA Today. ‘People treating you differently when you don’t feel any different is really alienating. You can see the way they look at you. I can see if that was who I surrounded myself with, that’s why you change. I find people who don’t change. That’s where I get my reality.’
She finds it difficult to hang out with some of the girls she meets on set, and has said: ‘I don’t trust a girl who doesn’t have any girlfriends. I have really close girlfriends but they’re guys like me – girls who eat and don’t know anything about fashion.’
According to E! News, Jennifer spent just under £3,000 on a French bulldog puppy in 2014 for her old friend Laura. According to the reports, Laura uploaded a stream of cute photos of her new pet to Instagram after Jennifer found the puppy online, and then the two friends went and picked it up from the seller’s home in California, with Jennifer’s pooch, Pippi, along for the ride. Laura has since shared loads of photos of her new puppy, called Frankenstein, and has even created his very own Instagram account.
And perhaps she did catch the spending bug, because in November 2014 Jennifer finally found something to drop a significant chunk of her money on, when she bought a palatial home in the exclusive suburb of Beverly Crest for $8.225 million. The 5,500 square foot house, which was built in 1991, had previously belonged to singer and actress Jessica Simpson, who’d handed it over a year earlier to billionaire Sumner Redstone’s girlfriend, Sydney Holland.
Jessica had hoped to sell the house for over $8 million when she put it on the market in May 2013 but ended up selling to Holland for the knockdown price of $6.4 million. Holland did not stay in the property for long, and shrewdly made a sizeable profit in just eighteen months. The French-style home boasts high ceilings, an updated kitchen, an office, five bedrooms and six bathrooms. The front of the house has a stone and floral courtyard with a koi pond, while an enviable back garden contains a sprawling lawn and a swimming pool.
Following the move to the star-studded area of Los Angeles, Jennifer discovered her neighbours included Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, as well as Cameron Diaz. While most stars tend to hire an expensive interior designer and give them free rein to buy top-of-the-range furniture, Jennifer was appalled at the idea and instead went out and bought herself a cheap sofa, vowing to take a decidedly low-key approach to furnishing her new home. She told the Telegraph, ‘I bought one from IKEA. It was a temper tantrum but it looks great.
‘It doesn’t matter how much money I make, unfairness in prices really fires me up. Like shopping in LA and a T-shirt costs $150.
‘I have perspective because I didn’t grow up in this business. I’m not from Hollywood; I’m from Kentucky. I didn’t become successful until a few years ago and I’m very aware of what the real world is and how much a couch costs.
‘Humour has helped me to survive all this,’ she added. ‘My dad taught me always to laugh at myself. I guess I can have an intellectual conversation for five minutes, but then I want to get back to laughing.’
At the same time, Jennifer has been forced to acknowledge that the world she inhabits as an A-list movie star could not be further away from her modest Louisville upbringing, and whether she likes it or not her situation is very different now. She is without doubt extremely rich and powerful, but every time it looks as though she cannot become an even bigger star, she manages to find another way to defy expectations. And she ended 2014 as the highest-grossing actress in Hollywood. Recognising her impact on the movie industry, Forbes financial magazine gave her the top spot in its Most Powerful Actresses of 2014 list, as she proved that female lead actresses can also make blockbuster action movies, as well as being sex symbols. These accolades, along with her various award nominations and wins, have meant that Jennifer now ranks among the most influential stars in Hollywood.
Guinness World Records also named Jennifer the Highest-grossing Action Heroine of All Time in its 2015 edition for her role in the Hunger Games franchise. The latest edition of the almanac of every accomplishment, from the incredible to the odd and arcane, was also a sell-out when it hit bookstores in September 2014.
In the same year, just two of her films, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and X-Men: Days of Future Past, combined to make $1.4 billion at the box office. Indeed The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 made history when it became the top-grossing movie released in 2014.
Production company Lionsgate announced that Mockingjay had reached $333.2 million at the North American box office within its first few weeks of release, meaning it was the highest-earning film of 2014, beating Guardians of the Galaxy.
And the previous year the series experienced similar success when Catching Fire beat Iron Man 3 to become 2013’s biggest release. As BuzzFeed pointed out, it was also the second year in a row that a film with a female lead had dominated the domestic box office.
And it was also the first time in box-office history that two films in the same franchise became number one, and by then of course it was almost impossible to recall that making the first film in the series with a relative unknown in the lead had seemed like a major risk at the time.
Under the direction of Gary Ross, the very first adaptation of the popular Suzanne Collins’ novel immediately smashed the box office in 2012, and not only won the top spot but did so with an starting total of $152 million.
For some idea of scale, that was $24 million more than the established superhero sequel Iron Man 2 managed on its debut. By the time The Hunger Games left cinemas, the female-fronted action flick had pulled in more than $691 million worldwide, breaking box-office records and launching Jennifer to superstar status. Her share of the profits meant she would never have to work again if she chose not to.
In the winter of 2013, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire fared even better. It raked in $158 million on the opening weekend, $424 million in the States and $864 million worldwide. Surpassing The Hunger Games, the second instalment became the highest-grossing action heroine movie ever, blowing past Linda Hamilton’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which made $204 million in America, Angelina Jolie’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), which took $186 million, and Sigourney Weaver’s Alien (1979), which made $85 million.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire also earned the title of highest domestic-grossing film of 2013, beating Iron Man 3. Plus, it broke into the Number 10 spot for highest domestic grossing films of all time, right behind E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
By the time the four-film franchise was halfway through, it had already made $1.52 billion worldwide. And with excitement over The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 reaching fever pitch ahead of its release, Katniss’s world domination looked set to continue.
Jennifer finished 2014 as the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood, with her movies taking in $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office. These figures will, of course, climb even higher when DVD sales and downloads are taken into account.
Chris Pratt finished in second place with $1.2 billion in global grosses, thanks to his starring role in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and the Warner Bros hit comedy, The Lego Movie. Marvel took a risk with the outer space adventure featuring lesser known comic book characters, but Pratt as roguish hero Peter Quill resonated with audiences, and Guardians of the Galaxy was among the highest-grossing films ever made in the United States, with a box-office tally of $333 million.
Scarlett Johansson finished in third place with an international box-office haul of $1.18 billion, mostly from the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which grossed $714 million worldwide. Johansson reprised her role as Black Widow in the film starring Chris Evans as the shield-carrying superhero.
The rest of Johansson’s box-office success came from her films Lucy and Under The Skin.
But despite her obvious bankability, Jennifer became embroiled in a worldwide controversy when it emerged that she had actually been paid considerably less than her male American Hustle co-stars.
News broke in December 2014, as a result of a damning cache of emails, which were leaked from Sony Pictures after the company’s computer system was hacked, that the leading men all earned a significant amount more than the women they starred alongside. Rumours had apparently long been circulating about private dealings in the film industry, which saw the men come out on top, and the whispers were confirmed in one of those leaked emails, which revealed all of the lead actors’ earnings in American Hustle – including the share of profits paid to Jennifer, Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams.
