Though known primarily as the oddly premised film Jodie Foster directed her pal Mel Gibson in as he continued his long road back from purgatory, playing a depressed CEO who starts communicating via a beaver hand puppet, Lawrence was there too. She plays Norah, a grieving classmate of Gibson and Foster's son, Porter, played by Anton Yelchin.
Though The Beaver wasn't released until 2011, the dark dramedy was shot in 2009, before Lawrence—who till then was still known, if at all, primarily as the eldest daughter on The Bill Engvall Show—burst out of the next-big-thing pack with a 2011 Oscar nomination for the 2010 indie drama Winter's Bone. The Beaver came out a few weeks after Lawrence made her Oscars debut in her unforgettable red Calvin Klein dress.
She was asked about it at the Burning Plain premiere back in 2009, where she told MTV News, "I still can't believe they hired me!...It's one of the best scripts I ever read." And then she made what at least appears to be her first on-the-record reference to farts.
Informed that Gibson was king of the pranks on movie sets, Lawrence said she'd heard as much and zinged back, "no, I'm gonna show up with a fart machine [and be] like, 'Ha! Two can play this game!'"
Meanwhile, in a 2011 interview promoting the film, Lawrence said that Gibson "carries the movie in an amazing way. He's incredible at what he does. I remember at the table read looking at him thinking, This guy needs an Oscar, for the table read."
About Foster, Lawrence said, "I don't think I've ever met a person that I respect more in my entire life. She's one of the smartest people I've ever met. She's an amazing director—I mean, technically, genius. And she knows how to talk to actors, which is so important...And it's like somebody forgot to tell her that she's famous, she's just so normal."
Foster, meanwhile, was pretty complimentary of Lawrence, who between filming and their movie's release had become a star.
"She has something that's really special, and I don't know if she has any control over it or if she's even aware of it, really," Foster told AMC, "but she has this pain that exists in her face. It's as if she has lived through world wars. And nothing could be further from who Jennifer is! She is a fun-loving Kentucky girl. She is a lot of fun to be around. She is anything but that, yet she has a weariness that can come out of her. And that's an amazing quality that just brings so much to dramas."