Jennifer Lawrence Admits She's 'Going Through a Meltdown'

(Image Credit: Vogue)

After transforming into "The Hunger Games" heroine Katniss Everdeen and winning an Academy Award for "Silver Linings Playbook," actress Jennifer Lawrence became an A-list celebrity almost overnight. And while she admits that she's grateful for the opportunities that fame has afforded her, she told Vogue that she's having trouble adjusting to the attention she gets in public now.

"I'm kind of going through a meltdown about it lately. I'm beginning to feel like a monkey in a zoo," she told the magazine, which hits newsstands Aug. 20, after a bystander tried to snap her photo at lunch. "All of a sudden the entire world feels entitled to know everything about me, including what I'm doing on my weekends when I'm spending time with my nephew. And I don't have the right to say, 'I'm with my family.'"

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Lawrence, 22, who has been busy filming "X-Men: Days of Future Past," admitted that she's "not OK" with fame and all the attention that has come with it.

"If I were just your average 23-year-old girl and I called the police to say that there were strange men sleeping on my lawn and following me to Starbucks, they would leap into action. But because I am a famous person, well, sorry, ma'am, there's nothing we can do. It makes no sense," she said, "I am just a normal girl and a human being, and I haven't been in this long enough to feel like this is my new normal. I'm not going to find peace with it."

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Still, Lawrence said later in the interview that as a "genuinely weird" child in Kentucky, she always knew she was different, and destined to do bigger things.

"I've never said this before because there is no way to say it without it being completely misunderstood, but ever since I was really little, I always had a very normal idea of what I wanted: I was going to be a mom and I was going to be a doctor and I was going to live in Kentucky. But I always knew that I was going to be famous," she said.

"I honest to God don't know how else to describe it. I used to lie in bed and wonder, 'Am I going to be a local TV person? Am I going to a motivational speaker?' It wasn't a vision. But as it's kind of happening, you have this buried understanding: Of course."