Jennifer Lawrence is setting the record straight more than a decade after Liam Hemsworth accused her of a “disgusting” habit before their kissing scenes in The Hunger Games.
Jennifer Lawrence, 36, became a Hollywood superstar playing Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, the blockbuster film franchise that followed teenagers forced to fight to the death in a brutal televised competition.
But behind the scenes, the actor apparently left one of her co-stars with memories that had nothing to do with the deadly games.
Playing Katniss’s childhood friend and romantic interest, Gale Hawthorne, Australian actor Liam Hemsworth shared several kissing scenes with Lawrence, who became one of his closest friends during filming. But their off-screen friendship didn’t necessarily make those intimate moments any more pleasant.
‘Disgusting’ breath
During a 2014 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the 36-year-old Aussie heartthrob was asked about kissing Lawrence, and his answer was anything but flattering.
“When you look at it on the outside, it looks like a great picture. She’s one of my best friends. I love her,” explained Hemsworth, who was married to Miley Cyrus from 2018 to 2020.
“But if we had a kissing scene, she would make a point of eating garlic or tuna fish, or something that was disgusting,” he added.
And according to the star of 2024’s Land of Bad, Lawrence wasn’t particularly interested in hiding her culinary choices from him.
“Right before the scene, she’d be like, ‘Yeah, I ate tuna’ or ‘I had garlic, and I didn’t brush my teeth,’” he recalled, adding, “And I’d be like, ‘Fantastic, I can’t wait to get in there and taste it!’”
‘I didn’t!’
More than a decade later, Lawrence has finally challenged his version of events, insisting that her love of certain foods had nothing to do with deliberately making their kissing scenes unpleasant.
“I didn’t! I think that like I don’t even know what to say, Liam,” Lawrence told the host of Call Her Daddy on Oct. 28, 2026. “We are filming for many months, and filming takes a lot of time. He made it seem like that’s just like something I did like on purpose. Like I would just…eat tuna.”
While she admitted that she loves a “tuna salad” and “tuna melt,” Lawrence maintained that she wasn’t intentionally eating them before kissing Hemsworth.
‘Lots and lots of mints’
And she revealed that her approach was rather different when she worked with Christian Bale on the 2013 film American Hustle – one year after the first The Hunger Games film was released – in which the two played a married couple.
“I did American Hustle with Christian Bale and I was like, ‘Oh damn’ and I was really clean and ate lots and lots of mints,” she joked.
How would you react if you had to kiss someone who’d just eaten tuna or garlic without brushing their teeth? Please let us know in the comment section below!
Read more:
