Jennifer Lawrence has filmed on a frozen lake. She says Calgary in August was worse.
On a Jan. 20, 2026 episode of Amy Poehler’s podcast, Good Hang, Poehler asked her about the coldest day she’s ever had on a set. Lawrence’s first thought was The Hunger Games. Then she changed her answer.
“I know like the real answer was like, you know, one of the Hunger Games movies where I was like on a frozen lake,” Lawrence said. “But it was actually in Calgary doing Die My Love, because it was August.”
“So it was supposed to be warm. And so there weren’t like warming coats or anything. And I, you know, I’m just in like a T-shirt or whatever. And so that was the coldest. That like broke my heart, like made me want to cry.”
“I was pregnant. I just remembered.”
Lawrence said she held it together on set and cried in her trailer instead.
“I cried in my trailer to Justine. She was like, what’s wrong? And I was like, I’m just feeling really cold,” she said. “But I was pregnant. I just remembered. Of course I cried. I probably cried every day.”
Justine is Justine Ciarrocchi, Lawrence’s longtime producing partner and a producer on Die My Love.
Lawrence was expecting her second child while the film was shot around Calgary from August to October 2024.
Amy Poehler’s theory about Canada
Poehler had been waiting for a story like this.
“This proves my theory that I said to Marty Short, like, it’s never warm in Canada. Never,” she said. “And Canadians pretend like, oh, we had a really nice day. And it’s like, you did not have a nice day. I know you were very cold.”
Canadians didn’t let that go. When the clip spread, plenty of people pointed out that Calgary regularly hits 30°C in the summer.
Is Calgary actually cold in August?
Not usually during the day. At night, it can be.
According to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s 1991-2020 climate normals for Calgary International Airport, August averages:
a daytime high of 23.1°C
an overnight low of 9.2°C
That’s a 14-degree swing between afternoon and night. T-shirt weather at 3 p.m. can be jacket weather by 9 p.m.
August 2024 also had its unsettled stretches. Airport records show rain around Aug. 6 and 7, more in the middle of the month, and again around Aug. 27 and 28. Near the end of the month, Environment and Climate Change Canada warned of snow at higher elevations in the Rockies.
Lawrence didn’t say which day she was talking about, so there’s no way to match her story to a single reading. Where she was standing matters too. Much of the film was shot at an old farmhouse in open fields outside the city, and an open field between long takes, in a summer costume, can feel a lot colder than the airport thermometer suggests.
So Lawrence isn’t wrong that she was cold. Poehler is wrong that it’s always cold.
Where Die My Love was filmed in Alberta
Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay, stars Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a couple who move to a remote house, where she struggles after the birth of their child. The story is set in the U.S., but much of it was filmed in Alberta.
The centrepiece is the house. The production found a long-empty former dairy farm just outside Calgary, between Calgary and Airdrie, renovated it and built interior sets. Location manager Edsel Hilchie said it was exactly what Ramsay envisioned: “a giant playground for her to create in.”
Other Alberta locations, according to Calgary Economic Development:
Sikome Lake in Fish Creek Provincial Park, for a beach scene shot around Labour Day weekend
Vecova Centre in Calgary
Calgary Shrine Event Centre
Didsbury
The Balzac area
Okotoks, where a home with an outdoor pool was used for a scene filmed in October
Filming ran into October, and Hilchie kept warning visiting crew that snow could arrive before they wrapped. It never did.
From a Calgary farmhouse to Cannes
Die My Love premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte co-star, and Martin Scorsese is among the producers.
It opened in theatres in November 2025 and earned eight British Independent Film Award nominations.
“Die My Love is the kind of prestige production that the Calgary region consistently attracts and supports,” said Calgary Film Commissioner Adnaan Wasey.
She’s not the first star Alberta weather has humbled
Lawrence got cold. Other productions have had Alberta’s weather work against them in the opposite direction.
The Revenant came to the Calgary area in the winter of 2014-15 for its snowy frontier scenes, then ran out of snow. Warm weather left the production without the landscape it needed, and it moved to Argentina to finish. Leonardo DiCaprio won his Oscar for the role.
Interstellar needed endless cornfields, so Christopher Nolan’s crew planted roughly 500 acres of corn near Okotoks and then filmed it. The famous dust storms were made with an artificial dust substitute, not Alberta weather.
The Last of Us shot across Calgary and southern Alberta, much of it through the winter, with locations from downtown Calgary to High River and Fort Macleod standing in for a ruined United States.
The lesson for every crew that comes here is the same as Lawrence’s: in Alberta, bring a coat, even in August.
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