Jennifer Lawrence talks about return after acting break

Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence is reflecting on her absence from the screen since 2019, following nearly a decade of one to three films a year.

"I'm so nervous," she told Vanity Fair at the start of an interview in the current issue. "I haven't spoken to the world in forever. And to come back now, when I have all of these new accessories added to my life that I obviously want to protect," the pregnant star added, referring to her marriage in October 2019 to Manhattan art-gallery director Cooke Maroney and the child they are expecting.

Lawrence, 31, who stars opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in director Adam McKay's upcoming end-of-the-world political satire "Don't Look Up," followed by other projects, told the magazine, "I was not pumping out the quality that I should have."

Her four most recent films were disappointing either critically (2016 science-fiction romance "Passengers"), commercially (2017 psychological-horror film "Mother!") or both (2018 espionage thriller "Red Sparrow" and 2019 Marvel Comics X-Men movie "Dark Phoenix").

"I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I'd gotten sick of me," Lawrence continued. "It had just gotten to a point where I couldn't do anything right. If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn't she run?’ "

She added, "I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘OK, I said yes, we're doing it. Nobody's mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul."

The star — whose films include "Silver Linings Playbook" (2012), for which she won an Oscar, and "Winter's Bone" (2010), "American Hustle" (2013) and "Joy" (2015), loosely based on Long Island entrepreneurial icon Joy Mangano, each of which earned Lawrence a nomination — also had to contend with the coronavirus pandemic shutting down film and TV production for a time. She additionally took time off for her wedding.

Lawrence has no social media and has made no further comments.