When you’re spending a secluded three months filming a spy thriller in Eastern Europe — during one of the most freezing cold winters on record — it’s not hard to bond with your costars.
“It was just a really enjoyable group of people to be around,” Australian actor Joel Edgerton, 43, tells PEOPLE in the new issue about getting close to Jennifer Lawrence, 27, and the entire Red Sparrow crew while shooting in Budapest, Vienna, Bratislava and London. “We’d just mostly go out to dinners and stuff. I need friends, see! We all needed friends! We were alone in Eastern Europe!” says Lawrence with a laugh.
Lawrence notes the majority of the film’s crew, including director Francis Lawrence, were people she already knew from shooting Hunger Games, so they were tight-knit from the start.
“Even the camera guys were from Hunger Games,” says Lawrence. “So it was a pretty O.G. crew. It was actually a really hard group to get into. But Joel made it.”Edgerton says, “It literally felt like I was visiting someone’s else’s Thanksgiving dinner.” Edgerton and Lawrence’s friendship has continued since filming the thriller, in which Lawrence plays a Russian spy trained to use her sexuality to get information, and Edgerton is an American CIA operative hoping to turn her into a double agent. But they each think the other one is a little bit weird.
“Joel is genuinely the weirder one,” Lawrence says. “He came over for the Mayweather fight and had a bunch of pens in his pocket, and I was like ‘Why do you have so many pens in your pocket,’ and he said, And a breadstick!’ and took it out and ate it. I was like whoa.”
“What’s weird about that?” counters Edgerton. When asked if there was anything weird about Lawrence, Edgerton had to pause and think.
“He’s got nothing. My weirdest habit is reading,” Lawrence says.
Shrugging, Edgerton says, “Everything that Jen does is sort of weird.”
