The actress opened up to ET about the most difficult and intimidating aspects of playing a seductive Russian spy.
Jennifer Lawrence is no stranger to challenging roles, but playing a seductive Russian spy in her latest thriller, Red Sparrow, still came with its fair share of unexpected challenges -- including mastering the difficult accent.
"I've never done a foreign accent before," Lawrence admitted to ET's Carly Steel during a roundtable interview alongside her co-star, Joel Edgerton, and the film's director, Francis Lawrence. "It was daunting and scary but I hope we pulled it off."
American actors playing Russian characters have notoriously had a hard time pulling off realistic Russian accents over the years, and while Lawrence said she feels good about her efforts, she said she wanted to refrain from bragging until the movie is released.
"I don't want to talk about the accent until the movie comes out because I don't want to say, 'I did this and I did that, and it was really quite easy for me,' and then just get annihilated," Lawrence explained.
As for Edgerton, who stars as CIA operative Nathaniel Nash, the Australian actor said he was confident in his ability to pull off an American accent, but only because he's had experience.
"I felt somewhat comfortable because I've done a number of American accent jobs before," Edgerton reflected. "But it still feels weird … because you're talking differently than the way you were taught."
"His American accent is perfect," Lawrence chimed in. "It's flawless."
In Red Sparrow, Lawrence stars as Dominika Egorova, a former prima ballerina who is recruited to join an intelligence service to become a master spy.
The Hunger Games star says learning how to play a ballerina came with its own intense challenges.
"The idea of me being a ballerina was, before four months of training, laughable," she shared. "Now I can move my arms a little bit."
Lawrence said that she started by learning the basics, and then she went on to learn the dance she would need to perform for the film.
"I couldn't get on pointe or anything like that, but it was more helpful for just kind of learning the mental and physical discipline that goes [into ballet]," she said. "It was more of a character study."
Beyond the accent or learning ballet, one element of her role that really threw Lawrence for a loop was the film's more explicitly sexual moments -- including one scene in which her character appears fully nude.
"There's one particular scene in the movie where your nightmare comes true from grade school, where you're standing naked in front of a classroom full of people. So that became a reality, but it actually wasn't that bad," she recalled.
The actress said she was very nervous the night before they shot the scene, but when she showed up on set, "Everybody made me feel so comfortable that I probably at a certain point started making everybody else uncomfortable."
"Because I'd be like, 'I don't want the robe. I'm hot. I'm eating.' Everybody's like, 'She needs to cover up,'" Lawrence joked.
Check out the video below for more on Red Sparrow, which hits theaters March 2.
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