Jennifer Lawrence may be a Hollywood heavyweight today, but even she’s haunted by a role that slipped through her fingers: Alice in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. During an interview on the Howard Stern Show, the Red Sparrow actress confessed that this lost opportunity devastated her.
While we know Lawrence today as a go-to star for bold roles, her early career was littered with auditions—some successful, some not so much. And this one? Losing out on Alice in Wonderland stung. She shared that, at the time, she and fellow actress Emma Stone were often up for the same parts, with this one hitting particularly hard. “Emma Stone and I had this conversation once, ’cause we used to always audition for the same thing… She got one thing that I was dying for, but the one thing that killed me — the only time I’ve ever been truly devastated by losing an audition … was Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland,” she recalled.
Mia Wasikowska landed the role, bringing Burton’s mad, candy-colored Wonderland to life with Johnny Depp’s kooky Mad Hatter stealing scenes. Alice in Wonderland wasn’t a critic’s dream (holding 52% on Rotten Tomatoes), but it crushed the box office. Disney soon greenlit a sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, though it tanked big time, critics weren’t any kinder. Safe to say, Lawrence might’ve dodged a bullet on that one.
In the interview, Lawrence acknowledged that Wasikowska was “perfect and amazing” in the role. And there was something else: “I couldn’t have had a British accent,” she admitted. Considering the feedback on her Russian accent in Red Sparrow, she may have had a point.
Yet Lawrence’s “missed” roles don’t end with Alice. She revealed another big-ticket audition from her early days that didn’t pan out: Twilight. Lawrence laughed off any hard feelings about missing out on Bella Swan, saying she “didn’t know what it was” and that auditions could be less-than-glamorous. “You just get, like, five pages, and they’re like, ‘Act, monkey!’”
Instead of Twilight, Lawrence would star in a different YA juggernaut: The Hunger Games. By then, she already had a solid indie reputation and was prepared for what playing Katniss Everdeen could mean for her career. “I knew The Hunger Games was gonna be a life-changer, and the other fear was only being known for that character,” she explained.
While missing out on Alice in Wonderland once hurt, Lawrence’s career has hardly suffered for it. In hindsight, perhaps missing that whimsical yet divisive franchise was for the best. Today, she’s got the luxury of picking her projects, no longer waiting for that fateful casting call. And for fans? It’s hard to imagine her playing anyone other than Katniss Everdeen.
