'I Feel Like I Got Gang-Banged.' Jennifer Lawrence Opens Up About Nude Photo Hack

In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Mother! star and Hollywood favorite Jennifer Lawrence reflected on the “violating” experience of having her nude photos leaked over the internet back in August 2014.

“When the hacking thing happened, it was so unbelievably violating that you can’t even put it into words,” she said. “I feel like I got gang-banged by the f–king planet — like, there’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone.” She also said that she was “still processing” the experience, in which private photos shared to her then-boyfriend Nicholas Hoult were hacked from iCloud.

“I think, like, a year and a half ago, somebody said something to me about how I was ‘a good role model for girls,’ and I had to go into the bathroom and sob because I felt like an imposter — I felt like, ‘I can’t believe somebody still feels that way after what happened.’ It’s so many different things to process when you’ve been violated like that,” she added. Lawrence has been best-known for playing a number of strong female characters in her films, including the fiery leader Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games movies and entrepreneur Joy Mangano in Joy.

And while the photo leak may have made her squeamish around showcasing her sexuality on film, she’s moving past it in her work on upcoming spy thriller Red Sparrow, out in 2018.

“I’ve always been like, ‘Absolutely no way’ — especially after what happened — ‘no way am I ever gonna do anything sexual,'” she told the Reporter. “So, for me, doing Red Sparrow— I felt like I was getting something back that had been taken from me.”

Write to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@time.com.