How Jennifer Lawrence Lost Her Hearing While Filming Catching Fire

Jennifer Lawrence is a household name with dozens of wildly successful films on her resume, from "Silver Linings Playbook" (for which she won an Oscar) to the hit Netflix flick "Don't Look Up." However, a lot of fans today still associate the actor with her work in "The Hunger Games" trilogy, in which she starred as the gifted archer and rebel Katniss Everdeen. Looking back on the experience, Lawrence told Viola Davis on Variety's Actors on Actors series that playing such a role felt like an "awesome responsibility." At the time, she said, "Nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work. Because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead," she explained.

Lawrence rose to the challenge, despite the mental and physical demands of the role. In preparation for the movie, Lawrence had to undergo months of rigorous training and adopt a set of new skills in order to convincingly portray her character. She trained in archery, parkour, tree and rock climbing, hand-to-hand combat — even basic running. And while filming for the franchise, Lawrence sustained minor injuries that left her in the hospital and resulted in her being partially deaf. Fortunately, however, the hearing loss turned out to only be temporary.

Jennifer Lawrence went partially deaf while filming "Catching Fire," the 2013 second installment in "The Hunger Games" film franchise. Speaking with Vanity Fair, the actor explained that she developed an ear infection from all the diving she had to do for the film and ended up with a punctured eardrum. She went deaf in one ear for months as a result. "That wasn't actually physically challenging. It was just ear challenging," Lawrence said of the injury. "Because I got all of these ear infections from the diving and the water and all of that stuff. And then a jet from one of the cornucopia scenes punctured my eardrum." Yikes! 

It wasn't the first time that Lawrence suffered an accident while filming for the movie franchise. In 2012, Lawrence also sustained a minor injury while shooting a scene for "The Hunger Games" that led to her being rushed to a nearby hospital. She explained to The Hollywood Reporter that she thought she'd ruptured her spleen. "I had to do 10 'wall runs,' where you run at the wall as hard as you can to get traction. I ran at it and my foot didn't go up, so I caught the wall with my stomach. My trainer thought I had burst my spleen," she said. "I had to get a CAT scan and go into a tube where they put this fiery liquid in your body." While she did end up with bad bruises, Lawrence was otherwise fine, fortunately. 

Jennifer Lawrence has quite a history of accidents during filming her movies, from "The Hunger Games" trilogy to her 2021 Netflix film "Don't Look Up." According to reports, the actor — who plays Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky in the hit Netflix film — suffered an injury after glass from a controlled explosion on set flew and accidentally hit her near the eye. Lawrence, who was shooting a scene with co-star Timothée Chalamet, was said to be bleeding and he was holding her face when the paramedics arrived on the scene. Meanwhile, sources from PageSix said production was halted for the day following the incident which left the cast and crew "shaken up." "An explosion was set up for a stunt in which glass shatters," an insider told the outlet. "It was a stunt in which the glass was supposed to shatter — but it injured her." 

In 2017, Lawrence also had quite a scary experience while filming the psychological horror thriller "Mother!". The actor revealed that she accidentally tore her diaphragm and dislocated a rib after hyperventilating for a scene. "People thought I was beaten up, so I want to clear it up that I did it to myself," she said at the time, according to the Daily Mail. She also said in an interview with Variety, "I've never had to go this dark before. So I just kind of lost control of myself. I tore my diaphragm and popped my chest rib out."