How a spider helped Jennifer Lawrence win Silver Linings Playbook role

IT APPEARS that Jennifer Lawrence owes her role in Silver Linings Playbook and subsequent Best Actress Oscar to an audition with a spider.

Winning role ... Jennifer Lawrence, left, and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook.

ACCORDING to director David O. Russell, Jennifer Lawrence owes her Best Actress Oscar to an audition with a spider.

“I asked her to cry and she made me cry,” Russell said. “She cried, so she went to get a tissue in the bathroom. She went, ‘Ah! There’s a gigantic spider in the bathroom!’ She imitated how the spider went when she tried to attack [it]. That fascinated me as much as anything else. She was unlike anybody I’d ever seen.”

Speaking to a group of film students in Los Angeles, Russell also said that the audition for Silver Linings Playbook won over studio bigwig Harvey Weinstein who had been “sceptical” about Lawrence.

“I went personally to his office in New York to show him the [audition]. I didn’t trust him just looking at it casually himself ... within 30 seconds of looking at her I heard him say, ‘Oh my God.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, there you go.’ And that was that.”

Russell also recalled meeting a very different Lawrence at a 2011 American Film Institute lunch. “She looked kind of like an Orange County girl,” he said, “all dressed up in a white dress with big hair, with high heels. And I was like, ‘Who is that? That’s the girl from Winter’s Bone?’ I said, ‘Wow, she doesn’t look anything like that.’ Then [later in 2011], she did a Skype audition that blew me away.”

The director also spoke about his early days as a writer, when he was struggling to get by. Working as a waiter at fancy “corporate events”, he recalled meeting media mogul Barry Diller while serving as a waiter at a dinner party. “[I gave him] my screenplay, my horror movie. I could have been fired so badly. He was very kind to me, God bless him. I did that to him twice. And then I found the script in the garbage down in the lobby of the building.”