“He likes it when it’s blue, and he’s even happier when there aren’t any clouds,” an unnamed narrator explains of her husband in Ariana Harwicz’s novel, Die, My Love. “Personally,” she continues, “I don’t give a damn if I’m under the open sky or shut up in a trunk.” This cavalier morbidity is not a joke nor a temporary glitch in an otherwise mentally well woman; rather, it is one pebble in a rocky beach of psychosis, a hint at a larger psychological freefall.

For Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s feature film adaptation, the role—called Grace in the movie, though she often struggles to live up to that name—is brought to life by Jennifer Lawrence, whose portrayal of a mother grappling with postpartum turmoil after moving to the countryside with her husband is already being hailed as one of her finest performances. Lawrence, who won the Oscar for Best Actress in 2013 for Silver Linings Playbook, may well find herself back in the awards conversation. Opposite her, Robert Pattinson delivers a measured, empathetic performance as Jackson, Grace’s husband, whose efforts to understand her slow unraveling provide the film with its emotional counterweight, turning what should be an idyllic new beginning into a haunting study of love, isolation, and mental collapse. Even as the outside world teeters on the edge of collapse, Die My Love reminds us that nothing rivals the quiet apocalypse of one’s own mind.

MATHIAS ROSENZWEIG: Oh, God, everyone is so prompt, Jesus.

JENNIFER LAWRENCE: Oh, should I hang up and come back?

MR: That would be amazing. Thank you so much.

JL: I just woke up from a nap and have no concealer on, and I just apologize for my general vibe.

MR: You’re so fine. I apologize for my general vibe as well. Also, we’re not recording anything but audio, so no one will ever see anything.

JL: Thank you. Rob, if you take a screenshot, I swear to God…

ROBERT PATTINSON: [Laughs]

MR: Jennifer, Martin Scorsese sent this novel to you, saying that he could envision you in this lead role. What were your first thoughts about the book?

JL: Martin suggested it [and] suggested that I star in it. So I read it that day and in one sitting. And as you can see, having just read it, it seems really hard to make it into a movie, because it’s very profound and intense, but it’s all told from the character’s point of view. It’s all in her mind. So I was wondering how that would translate to film. But Lynne Ramsey’s the most poetic director of our time, in my opinion, and so I knew only she could kind of pull something like this off, and I’ve wanted to work with her my entire adult life. So we asked, and then, I mean, I’m still pinching myself that she said yes.

MR: Rob, same question for you, either from reading the book or the first time you were reading the script. What were your first thoughts?

JL: I really doubt Rob has read the book.

RP: She says as she’s waking up from a nap and drinking a Celsius!

JL: Have you?

RP: Of course I have!

JL: Oh, I apologize.

RP: It’s incredibly traumatic, the book anyway. I read the script first, and the script was sort of funny. I think from the first draft of the script to the second one as well, I thin it changed a lot, and as we were shooting the movie as well. Her husband in the book, he’s like a kind of device in the book. I mean, he’s just totally and utterly useless. It was kind of nice how the story we’re telling sort of organically evolved into more of a relationship. The first draft of the script, as well, was way more like the book. My character wasn’t around as much.

JL: Well, you did that, though. I feel like even the draft that we ended upworking on, all of that strengthening of the male characters [helped] so that he wasn’t just being galled over by her antics, [and] that was [all] you. MR: There’s definitely a lotless of the Jackson character in the book.

RP: You sort of despise him in the book.

MR: Speaking of despising him, how did you feel about your characters? Robert, do you like Jackson? Jennifer, do you like Grace?

RP: I think it’s a really interesting telling of a love story. I’ve seen it a lot in reality, where you see someone like Jackson, who’s dealing with someone else who’s got incredibly complex mental health issues, and is probably not only a little bit more unstable, but more intelligent and kind of more ambitious, and more everything. You just have a guy who’s sort of unqualified to do it, but it doesn’t affect his love for the person at all. He’s just like, ‘We had a really great relationship. What is happening? Like, why? I don’t understand why I’m suddenly no longer living in a recognizable reality at all.’ His only kind of way to address it is ‘I don’t know, I’ll take you to the hospital.’ I just realized it’s like an actual statement, guys [saying] “Why are you acting crazy?” And girls going, “I’m not acting, I actually am crazy!”

JL: I agree with Rob’s take. His character just didn’t have the tools to manage what was happening. But I think what’s so amazing in the movie, something that was brought out even more than what was on the page, is that you really can see how much they love each other. I like Grace. Because she wasn’t actually dangerous to me in my life and my family, I actually found her to be quite funny. My instinct was always to be more empathetic for Rob’s character, because I am a wife and I am responsible for another person’s, you know, daily life, and so I had to kind of every day, force myself out of that, because that just wasn’t Grace’s experience. You know, she did not feel sorry for Jackson. She was living something very kind of singular.

MR: How much were you sort of improvising or trying new things on set while shooting?

JL: Even when it’s not straight-up improv, and coming up with new lines, it all changes once you start the back and forth, and once somebody delivers something one way, and then changes the energy, and then that changes the way that you deliver it back. Especially with Rob, that happened like every day. Sometimes an argument would be funnier than either of us expected it to be. And Lynne is such a great observer, and she’s really open and earnest. She doesn’t care if something that’s supposed to be serious is also funny. She trusts her gut instinct more than almost any director I’ve ever worked with. I mean, the script was somewhat abstract, and there was one central scene I basically based my entire understanding of the character on. It was like a four-page-long dialogue scene. And we turn up on set, and Lynne’s like, ‘I think I just want to cut all the dialogue,’ and I’m like, ‘What do you mean? It’s like, my biggest scene!’

MR: I imagine as an actor that would be a little bit jarring.

JL: I think Rob cried a little bit.

RP: Having a child at the same time, just before we started, you suddenly feel like, “Well, I have no control over my life anyway.” It’s kind of nice. It’s definitely quite freeing.

MR: You both were recently in the same place as your respective characters, in terms of having very young kids and becoming first-time parents. What conversations around parenthood did this film bring up, either with each other, friends, spouses, or even just internally?

JL: I mean, anybody who has young babies or kids knows that all you talk about is your babies and kids. So that’s all Rob and I talked about, was our kids, and he had a newborn, and was flying back and forth over the weekends to be with them. But personally, I really struggled with, again, my opposite instincts in trying not to compare what I would do to what Grace would do. It’s 100 times harder when you do have your own parenting instincts, you know?

MR: I imagine you can have a lot of sympathy or empathy for Grace, because you understand what she’s going through on some level, that she is a victim of herself and this world. But at the same time, she’s a guidebook of what not to do as a parent. You don’t want Grace babysitting your kids.

JL: You definitely don’t. And I remember there was one really big red flag I put up with Lynne. I was like, “Lynne, nobody would ever get their sleeping baby out of their bed. Like, closing the nursery door when your baby is sleeping is the single greatest part of parenting.” And she was just like, “No, she doesn’t give a shit.” And it was like, “Oh, okay, yeah.”

MR: Rob, what about you? What kind of conversations around parenting were brought up by the book or film?

RP: I mean, this might sound kind of immature—

JL: Oh God.

RP: But, you know, you do worry before you have a child. You’re like, “God, I’m gonna mess it up.” And then you see a film like this and you know that you can be a whole lot worse.

JL: I did also feel like a great parent finishing this movie.

RP: Whenever I see parents who are just totally chill with chaos, like, I cannot deal with that level of chaos, multiple different noise sources, screaming, loud music, smashing things. And some people are just like, totally fine with that. And I literally just start sitting in the corner, weeping.

JL: He cries a lot.

MR: What was it like for you two to work together?

JL: Rob brought so much more dimension to the film as a whole. He really held firm with this kind of backbone for his character, which gave me so much more to push back against. I’ve never worked with an actor who was really in such a similar place as me in our lives, being new parents, which was so lovely, and also built up natural trust, so that when you had to do these crazy, you know, nude, attacking each other like tigers scenes, there was some sort of added level of trust. Rob is sensationally smart and really sweet. So it was fun. I enjoyed working with Rob immensely. Rob?

RP: I really enjoyed Jennifer. It’s weird—we hadn’t really met very many times before we shot this, which is odd considering how many overlaps there are in our lives. But I’d always wanted to work with her. [Before working on the movie], I was literally talking to her about something else, and she just said, “Oh, by the way, do you want to play my husband in this Lynne Ramsay movie?” And I was like, “What? Why?” Because it wasn’t even on my radar. It was such a strange conversation, and I was in a very strange place in my life at the time, thinking, “Why are there no cool jobs?” She’s a phenomenal actor and so much fun to work around. Jennifer, you’re not annoying.

JL: I didn’t find you annoying either. Which is quite extraordinary, to be honest. Hard to find.

MR: You are both such seasoned veterans in Hollywood at this point. Do you still get nervous about a film that, until now, has been so public to become so public? What does that feel like?

JL: Truly, so awful, and the experience only adds to the dread, because I’ve had so many experiences of working so hard on something, loving something so deeply, and then releasing it to the world, and the world just being like, “Boo! Hate you!” It is so awful. And [yet] somehow, I read a script, I meet with the director, we get on set, we start doing it, and somehow I’m able to forget that this part of the process will happen. I mean, I’m very blessed and very lucky. But it’s a very scary few months. My husband was so confused because he doesn’t have as much experience with this stuff. So I was telling him about my anxiety, and he was like, “But the movie’s incredible.” And I was like, “I know, but that doesn’t matter. People might not get it.” And he was like, “But they’re wrong.” Like, as if that was supposed to make me feel better.

MR: The movie ends differently from the book. Did you find the ending to be hopeful?

JL: I took it differently because, when we were shooting it, I was a mother of one, and I actually had a lovely postpartum. I mean, it was, of course, hard, but I connected right away with my son. And I didn’t struggle with the specific things that Grace was struggling with, and I was pregnant with my second. And so I think I just kind of naturally had this more hopeful and optimistic view of everything. So when we were shooting the forest, the fire, and all that stuff, I saw that as like a rebirth and something really optimistic, and him chasing after her, like it might be different and it might be new, but she’s not turning back, and he’s not gonna let her go, and he’s going to follow her. And then after I had my second [child], I did suffer really bad postpartum, and I was like, “Oh no, maybe she took herself out of the world.” Because sometimes when you’re that low, you look at this perfect thing and you’re like, ‘I’m the only thing that could possibly be wrong with you. What if I’m bad for you?’ And so then I thought about it differently.

RP: From Jackson’s perspective, there’s something that’s kind of ambiguous. Something quite romantic to me about someone who, even though they are doomed to keep repeating the same thing, in being doomed, they’re connected to each other eternally, but in trauma.

JL: In hell.

RP: I just love that scene when he tries to fight back and is like, ‘You’re the worst person I’ve ever met!’ And then immediately he changes and is like, ‘I can try harder! I can try harder!’ It’s how you feel in those situations when you’re trying to understand a situation like this within any kind of logical form; it’s just impossible, but your brain still is like, “There has to be some logic somewhere.” And I think that is a version of love as well, even if it might be your own sense of sanity. Maybe it’s just difficult to delineate between the two.

This story appears in the pages of V157: now available for purchase!

Photography Cass Bird

Fashion Jamie Mizrahi & Taylor McNeill

Creative Director / Editor-in-Chief Stephen Gan 

Interview Mathias Rosenzweig

Hair (Jennifer) Gregory Russell (The Wall Group)

Hair (Robert) Jamie Taylor (A-Frame Agency)

Makeup (Jennifer) Georgie Eisdell (The Wall Group)

Grooming (Robert) Holly Silius (R3-Management)

Manicurist Jenna Hipp 

Executive Producer Dana Brockman (Viewfinders)

Producer Max Bonbrest (Viewfinders)

Editor Kev Ponce

Cass Bird Studio Manager April Ellis

Bookings Director Goran Macura

Retouching Pascal Dangin

Lighting Director Clay Howard-Smith

Digital Technician Anthony Miller

2nd Photo Assistant Joey Abreu

Fashion Assistant (Jennifer) Alex Moghtadaie

Fashion Assistant (Robert) Lauren Marron

Set Designer Bette Adams

Set Design Assistant Morgan Smith

Grooming Assistant (Robert) Natalie Tchokreff

Production Assistants Chris Olsen, Ernie Torres

Location Image Locations

Equipment MILK Studios