6 minute read
Invisible No More: Brie Larson
Last year’s Oscar win was instant reward for Brie Larson, right? Wrong. Decades of due diligence primed her for the spotlight, and this month she resumes her rightful place – with a bout of blockbuster recognition
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Hers encapsulates the immediacy of Hollywood fame: merely 14 months and one award-winning movie ago, you’d have been forgiven for not spotting Brie Larson were she to stroll past you in the street – in spite of an acting career that already spanned almost two decades. Pre-supernova, fans of independent film may have been familiar with her from her critically acclaimed role as a care worker in Short Term 12, or for playing Amy Schumer’s level-headed sister in the ribald comedy Trainwreck. But Larson was still able to go out to dinner in her native Los Angeles untroubled by the attentions of the paparazzi.
Not since February 2016. Her emotionally wrenching performance in the film Room gained nominations for both a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award, in Best Actress categories that included Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren. In the midst of the Oscarnomination buzz that naturally followed, she said, modestly, “It seems so far removed from my reality. Even talking about it feels like planning your dream wedding when you don’t have a boyfriend; there’s just no point. I’m so thrilled that the movie is resonating with [audiences], and that is honestly all I could ever have hoped for.” Hope wasn’t required – she emerged victorious from the Academy Awards, and the other nominations turned into triumphs, too. The life of this 27-yearold hasn’t been the same since.
When Room was receiving its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Larson wore a white lace shirt and fuchsia skirt, with her blonde hair in gentle waves, and her sunny appearance and manner seemed starkly at odds with the dark places her character, Ma, demanded of her. But go there, Larson definitely did – preparing for the role by subjecting herself to a month of isolation, barricaded in her Los Angeles apartment. “A lot of old memories resurfaced, things about my childhood that I had forgotten,” she recalls. “I remembered moving from Sacramento to Los Angeles with my mum when I was seven and my sister was three or four. We moved into a studio apartment that was not much bigger than [the shed set in] Room, with a bed that pulled down from the wall.”
Unbeknown to Larson and her sister, Milaine, their parents had separated, and her mother was struggling to make ends meet. “I just had two pairs of jeans and a couple of shirts and a pair of shoes, and we ate Top Ramen noodles every night,” she now remembers. “But my mum has this incredible imagination, and she instilled so much life into that space I didn’t realise we didn’t have anything.” Larson has spoken of how she talked to different trauma specialists for the lead role, “about sexual abuse and what would happen to a mind after you’ve been stuck in that space for seven years. You’d start to normalise some stuff. Then I spoke with a nutritionist about the lack of vitamin D, about not having a toothbrush, not being able to wash your hair or face, [the] lack of nutrition”.
Larson was a fan of the Emma Donoghue book long before the opportunity to play Ma came along. “I absolutely loved it and devoured it in a day,” she enthuses. Filming it, however, brought numerous challenges. The first half of the 10-week shoot – which, unusually, was filmed chronologically – was conducted entirely within a 10ft x 10ft shed-like room inside a Toronto studio. “It was exhausting for the crew to shoot in so confined a space, and you could really feel the momentum in the room, of us all desperately wanting to get out,” she recalls. “That sense of confinement was very real.”
Her stage is now exponentially bigger. You’ll see her back on the silver screen this month in blockbuster Kong: Skull Island, directed by Jordan Vogt- Roberts. It was filmed in Hawaii, where she and co-star Tom Hiddleston were “running around in the jungle the whole time, laughing like children”. A greater departure from a cramped shed it is hard to imagine. “It’s a bigger production than I’ve ever been involved in, in every way,” she confesses.
The actress is still based in LA, but is rarely there more than one weekend a month. Does her itinerant lifestyle put a strain on relationships? She pauses before saying, “I don’t really have any people in my life who aren’t gypsies.” Her close friends include actress Shailene Woodley, and she’s engaged to Alex Greenwald from the band Phantom Planet (who has also modelled for Gap, and acted in Donnie Darko). “There isn’t anyone in my life who is going to get upset about how much travelling I have to do, or whether or not I’m available for drinks that night,” she adds.
Larson is the first to admit that she’s not sure where her desire to act came from. “That has been one of the biggest questions for me my whole life,” she laughs. Growing up in Sacramento, California, her parents were both chiropractors. At six, Brie told her mother, “I know what my dharma [duty] is: to be an actor.” “That’s weird,” she notes now. Not least since she was exceptionally shy. “I was nervous to even talk to other kids in my class,” she says. “I would hide in my room when my parents had people over.” Her mother was initially sceptical about her acting ambitions, but since Brie would not let the subject lie, at seven years of age, she was allowed to take some lessons. On stage she came out of her shell. “I found I could perform in front of 200 people, but I would still feel nervous having a one-on-one conversation,” she remembers.
Her first professional job was performing in sketches on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, after which she won roles in tween and teen fodder such as Disney’s Right On Track and Sleepover (“I was not a child star,” she has said, “I was more like a young auditioner”). When it came time to transfer to high school, Larson decided she wanted to be home-schooled so she could continue to act. “I was choosing something that was totally different from everyone I knew, and I had to question, is this right for me?” She decided it was. “And then I had to ask myself, do I want to go college?” Again, she decided to stick with acting over formal education.
In her mid-teens, Larson also briefly dabbled in the music industry. Having written and recorded songs at home, which she uploaded to her own website, one of them, Invisible Girl, ended up getting airplay on an LA radio station. At 15, she was offered a record deal and flown around America, recording songs for an album. But by the time Finally Out Of PE was released in 2005, Larson had become disillusioned with the business, unhappy with being forced to record material that was not her own. “I came to realise that there has to be a purpose to my art, that my work has to be of service,” she says. “If I am just doing this for financial gain, that counts for nothing – there’s nothing substantial in that.”
That decision governed her choice to focus mainly on low-paying independent projects such as Diablo Cody’s television series United States Of Tara, which starred Toni Collette as a housewife with a multiple-personality disorder, and the indie hit Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, written and directed by Edgar Wright. The acclaimed Short Term 12, in which Larson plays Grace, the manager of a home for troubled children, did not make her any money either, but was of value in other ways. “It was my first leading role – as an adult – which means that you get more screen time, so you have more time to show complexity,” she says. “It is really important to me that women are shown as having contradictions. In the case of Grace, that you can be so loving to others, and yet be so hard on yourself. That was the first time I was really able to expose those different parts of our humanity.”
Next Larson moved behind the camera and wrote and directed a short film, The Arm – about social pressure and relationships in a technologically advanced world, which won an award at Sundance back in 2012. “I don’t think I have ever felt more proud in my life,” she beams. But despite the bounty of accolades, her motivations, she insists, have never included amassing a cabinet of trophies: “As I’ve got older, I’ve realised there isn’t anything inside of me that isn’t what somebody else feels too. And what excites me is to make things that connect with people.”
Interview: Jane Mulkerrins | Additional Words: Chris Ujma
