Jennifer Lawrence is pretty fearless—onscreen and off—but there is one thing she's afraid of: Bugs!
So, her Hunger Games: Catching Fire costar Jeffrey Wright thought it'd be pretty funny to see her reaction when she opened up a blue Tiffany box only to find it filled with live crickets! On Monday, Nov. 18, Wright told Chelsea Handler how the prank went down.
As we all remember from the 2013 Oscars last February, Lawrence won the Best Actress Academy Award for her role in Silver Linings Playbook. Shortly after that, the 23-year-old actress got back to work as Katniss Everdeen. As a welcome back gift of sorts, Wright decided to surprise his costar with the lovely gift of live insects.
"Just to scare her?" the Chelsea Lately host asked.
"Just to keep her, you know, grounded," Wright answered laughingly. "You know, what do you give the girl who has everything?"
Actually Wright, who plays Beetee in Catching Fire, gave his costar more than just crickets. "I didn't realize there's tissue in there [the box] and a little charm in there from Tiffany's…but the crickets eat the tissues," he said, "so it was crickets and cricket feces as well."
Just lovely! He came up with the idea, really, because of Lawrence's reaction to an arachnid (no, not an insect—but similarly creepy and crawly!) in the wild. "We were shooting parts [of the movie] in the rainforest," he recalled, "and she'd see a spider crawling out from under the brush, and she would run across to the other side. So, I thought she would get a kick out of it [the box of crickets] and she did!"
And without even trying, Lawrence got Wright back—"by default," he explained. "When you try and stuff like two or three hundred crickets in a box in your hotel room, they don't all fit," he said. "They leap out, and they hop under your bed and behind your dresser and they sing to you all night. So I lost some sleep."
Ha. He had it coming!