Jennifer Lawrence Jokes Liam Hemsworth Needs To “Get Over” His Hunger Games Kiss Complaint

Nearly a decade after Liam Hemsworth publicly accused her of purposely snacking on garlic or tuna fish before their blockbuster Hunger Games kissing scenes, Jennifer Lawrence is finally setting the record straight. “It was not intentional,” the Katniss Everdeen actor joked to host Sean Evans during her recent Hot Ones episode. “It was just, like, what I was eating, and then we’d kiss. He should just, you know, get over it.”

For those who need a refresher, Hemsworth, who co-starred as her character’s love interest Gale Hawthorne, made the playful jab while promoting The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 in 2014. “Any time I had to kiss Jennifer was pretty uncomfortable, really awkward,” the actor cracked on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “When you look at it on the outside it looks like a great picture. She’s one of my best friends. I love her. But if we had a kissing scene, she would make a point of eating garlic or tuna fish or something that was disgusting.”

He continued, “And right before the scene, she'd be like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t brush my teeth. I had tuna, I had garlic, and I didn't brush my teeth.’ I'd be like, ‘Fantastic, I can’t wait to get in there and taste it.’”

Their Mockingjay lip-locks couldn’t have been too off-putting, though, because Lawrence later confessed to kissing Hemsworth IRL, too. During a game of “Plead the Fifth” on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen the following December, she addressed rumors that they’d recently “had some PDA” in New York City. “Liam and I grew up together. Liam’s real hot. What would you have done?” she teased, adding that she “did, at one point” choose Gale over Peeta (Josh Hutcherson’s character in the Suzanne Collins big-screen adaptations).

Now starring in the “raunchy” comedy, No Hard Feelings, which she also produced, Lawrence recently revealed that she would “totally” reprise the “girl on fire” role she played in four Hunger Games movies between 2012 and 2015. “If Katniss could ever come back into my life, 100 percent,” the actor told Variety in an interview published on June 9.

In the same joint sitdown, Lawrence’s 21-year-old No Hard Feelings co-star Andrew Barth Feldman admitted that he was only about 10 years old when she made her Hunger Games debut at age 22. “I read the books and then the movies came out and it was a phenomenon,” he recalled. “I watched them recently just for fun and I did text [Lawrence] when it was happening. Those movies are so good. That whole genre didn’t exist yet. Nor did we know that genre of film incorporate such a huge and truthful and beautiful performance from Jen.”

Her true-to-form response? “You probably weren’t even born. . . . I can’t believe you could read when you were 10.”