Before she was famous, Jennifer Lawrence played young Allison in just one episode of Medium

By: Start TV Staff     Posted: January 18, 2023, 9:25AM

"I couldn't wake up!" Ariel Dubois cries to Allison near the end of the Medium episode "But for the Grace of God." She has just woken from a nightmare – the visionary kind her mother suffers from – where she was actually hanging out with a younger version of her mother. The idea of that would likely spook any teen, but because this is Medium, there's more to it than that.

In the episode, high school Allison surprisingly proved to be a bad influence on the oldest Dubois girl, who is often haunted by girls her own age. With frizzy hair and caked-on makeup, high school Allison may actually be more familiar to audiences today than she was when she first appeared when this episode debuted in 2008. For this episode only, young Allison was played by a young Jennifer Lawrence, four years before The Hunger Games would make her a superstar and five years before Silver Linings Playbook would win her an Oscar.

Our first look at Lawrence as young Allison on Medium comes when Ariel slides Allison's yearbook off the shelf and finds a photo of her mother with her best friend Casey. "Casey and Allison Forever!" is scrawled on the page, which finds two girls at a car wash, Lawrence striking a decidedly Eighties pose with her hair half up in a scrunchie-tied side ponytail.

This Medium appearance was one of Lawrence's earliest screen roles, but it was actually her second time appearing on the show. We saw her the year before in the episode "Mother's Little Helper." She's haunting Ariel in that episode, too, appearing as a tragic figure that clearly paid tribute to the classic horror movie Carrie

In that early episode, Ariel has to help Allison solve the murder causing Lawrence's character to haunt the Dubois daughter. Fortunately, Ariel proved as useful in this department as her mom, and when the case is solved and she's crowned prom queen in the end, there's no bucket of blood to dampen her spirits.

On TV, we saw Lawrence appear on shows like Monk, Cold Case and Medium the same year she joined the cast of The Bill Engvall Show in 2007. Three years later, she'd leap to the big screen in movies like Winter's Bone, X-Men: First Class and, of course, The Hunger Games, a bright future we bet Allison could've predicted, based on the 17-year-old's early chops displayed on her own hit show.

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