TIFF 2022: What made Jennifer Lawrence return to acting

The script of new film 'Causeway' gave her a sense of 'urgency'.

When Jennifer Lawrence was offered a script about a wounded US Army engineer who returns from Afghanistan to a strained relationship with her mother, she was on a sabbatical from acting and not yet a parent.

The Oscar-winning Silver Linings Playbook star, 32, whose fame had rocketed ever since the wildly popular The Hunger Games movies, had been a near-ubiquitous presence with a prolific run of movies, before announcing a pause because "everybody had gotten sick of me."

But when she read a script for Causeway - then entitled Red, White, and Water - something changed.

"It was really just something that came from the gut, just like this urgency," she said at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"I was very clear that I didn't want to work, and then somehow it landed on my desk, and I just had this sense of urgency, like 'let's make it, let's do this.'"

The subtle, character-driven indie movie - which also became the first project for Lawrence's fledgling production company - follows military engineer Lynsey's return to her mother's home in New Orleans.

A debilitating brain injury following an IED explosion in Afghanistan is not the only trauma she must overcome, as issues from her childhood and family life flood to the surface.

Lawrence chose the film in part to showcase "what these heroes go through to keep us safe."

"It was wonderful to be able to talk to the amazing men and women who have served, to try to get some more information and background," she said on the red carpet of the film's world premiere Saturday.

But she also partly drew on her own childhood for the role in Causeway, in which Lynsey has a fractious relationship with her unreliable mother.

"I have complications in my childhood just like everybody else does - so it was more kind of working that out," she said of the film, which began shooting in 2019 before it was interrupted by the pandemic and eventually resumed in 2021.

During that delay Lawrence also filmed and promoted doomsday comedy Don't Look Up.

And she has since become a mother herself, giving birth earlier this year to her son Cy.

"Oh God, everything changes after you become a mom!" she said.

Causeway will be released November 4 in select theaters and on Apple TV+. The Toronto International Film Festival runs through September 18.