As I’ve said time and again, I kind of like Jennifer Lawrence. I think she’s beautiful, I think she’s talented, and I have high hopes that she’s not going to turn out to be some kind of smug, lip-biting, eye-rolling troll. Most of her interviews are pretty good, and she comes across pretty well-adjusted. Jennifer recently got the lead role in The Hunger Games, which many people think will be Jennifer’s chance to shine in a major role in a major studio film. By the way, for all of those people who were saying that Jennifer lost all of that weight because she was preparing for the Katniss role – bullsh-t. Her startling body makeover began MONTHS before she was in the running for Katniss.

Anyway, Jennifer recently dyed her blonde hair to this dark brunette for The Hunger Games. She even made the cover of this week’s Entertainment Weekly, in a preview for the film.

Fans of The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins’ terrifically urgent dystopian trilogy about children forced to fight to the death — have always been protective of 16-year-old heroine Katniss Everdeen. So when Lionsgate and director Gary Ross announced that they had cast 20-year-old Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) in the lead role, the community was thrown into an inevitable tailspin. Was she too old, too blonde, too pale, too pretty to do the gritty warrior girl justice?

In this week’s cover story, EW was granted an exclusive interview with a newly brunette Lawrence, and spent hours watching her train on a Los Angeles archery range and track, just days before she was due on the North Carolina set.

In a free-wheeling interview, Lawrence describes her first encounter with Ross last winter, during the height of Oscar season. “He was asking me what the experience was like,” she recalls, “and I just kind of opened up and said, ‘I feel like a rag doll. I have hair and makeup people coming to my house every day and putting me in new, uncomfortable, weird dresses and expensive shoes, and I just shut down and raise my arms up for them to get the dress on, and pout my lips when they need to put the lipstick on.’ And we both started laughing because that’s exactly what it’s like for Katniss in the Capitol. She was a girl who’s all of a sudden being introduced to fame. I know what that feels like to have all this flurry around you and feel like, ‘Oh, no, I don’t belong here.’”

When Lawrence was offered the role, she describes her response as a mixture of elation — and desperate anxiety. “I knew that as soon as I said yes, my life would change,” she says. “And I walked around an entire day thinking ‘It’s not too late, I could still go back and do indies, I haven’t said yes yet, it’s not too late.’”

And yet, who can turn their back on Katniss? “I love this story,” she says, “and if I had said no, I would regret it every day.” After officially signing on, Suzanne Collins herself called to offer a starstruck Lawrence her most hearty congratulations. “I feel like when you said yes,” the author told her, “the world got lifted off my shoulders.”

[From Entertainment Weekly]

Okay? Fans of the books, is she your Katniss? Will she do the character justice? I haven’t read the stuff, so I don’t know.

Regarding the brunette hair… it looks pretty good on her. I think she’s so used to being a blonde, it’s a whole new thing for her to do her makeup and style herself as a brunette, though. I’ll give her time to adjust. We’ll know the brown works when Gerard Butler tries to bone her. She is now exactly he’s type: leggy, brunette and young. If she tries anything with Gerry, I will cry.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame & EW.