Just last year, Jennifer Lawrence announced her willingness to return to the Hunger Games franchise, saying “If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent.” But right now, she has an even more demanding project on her plate: the upcoming birth of her second child.
The news came after the Lawrence—once the highest paid female actor in the world—was spotted in Los Angeles on her way to dinner. Her appearance spurred speculation that the 34-year-old might be expecting, with her representative confirming the pregnancy to Vogue on Sunday.
This will be the second child for Jennifer Lawrence and husband Cooke Maroney, who tied the knot on October 19, 2019. (Does that make last night’s dinner an anniversary celebration? Perhaps!) Maroney is “the greatest human being I’ve ever met,” Lawrence said the year they wed. “He really is, and he gets better.”
The two welcomed their first child, Cy Maroney, in April 2022. In the years surrounding her first pregnancy, Lawrence took a break from the business, telling Vanity Fair in 2021 that “everybody had gotten sick of me.”
“I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right. If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’”
In recent years, the star has been far more elusive, appearing in fewer films than she did during her awards-studded rise to the top in the 2010s. That retreat began even before she realized she pregnant with her first child, a revelation she had while in New Orleans to film Causeway, a 2022 release in which she played a veteran injured during the war in Afghanistan. “It was coming out of my performance in all these different creative ways, but I wasn’t conscious of it,” she told the New York Times in 2022.
“Then I went back, and when I’m home with my husband making this family, I’m so happy,” she said then.
Since then, she’s spoken less about her personal life and family. “It’s so scary to talk about motherhood. Only because it’s so different for everybody,” she told Vogue in 2022. “If I say, ‘It was amazing from the start,’ some people will think, ‘It wasn’t amazing for me at first,’ and feel bad.”
“My heart has stretched to a capacity that I didn’t know about,” she said then. “I include my husband in that. And then they’re both just, like, out there—walking around, crossing streets. He’s gonna drive one day. He’s gonna be a stupid teenager and be behind the wheel of a car. And I’m just gonna be like, ‘Good night!’ You know? Like, who sleeps?”