There’s a certain way to talk to a kid in a room full of adults in fancy clothes, and Brie Larson knows all about it. When Jacob Tremblay, who plays her 5-year-old son in Room, walks into the Crosby Street Hotel and a gaggle of publicists, Larson makes a beeline for him. “Jaaaaake!” she yells. Tremblay walks straight for her, making the sheepish smile that kids that age do, and exclaims, “You got tall!”
Larson and Tremblay at the Toronto International Film Festival.
John Shearer / Getty Images
“It’s just my heels,” she says, sinking immediately to the ground, tucking her legs beneath her, and allowing her four-inch suede pumps to splay out behind her. The next five minutes are Brie and Jake in a conversation bubble: about the dog he recently fostered, the movie he’s shooting upstate, his two new teeth, and, most importantly, their birthdays, which are just days apart. Each sent the other a celebratory Instagram: In Jacob’s, he lip-synchs 50 Cent’s “Hey shorty, it’s your birthday” refrain; in Brie’s, she shoves a cupcake in her mouth and sings off-key. As Brie is led away, Jacob is ushered toward a table piled with food. But all he wants to know is, “Can Brie sit next to me?”
Larson has described Tremblay as her best friend, and even though it’s been a year since they shot Room, they’ve spent the last few months darting in and out of each other’s lives: Larson’s Instagram is filled with photos of her and Tremblay goofing around at the Telluride Film Festival, where the film first premiered, and the Toronto Film Festival, where it won the coveted Audience Award — considered the best indicator of a film’s chance of earning an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Some may read these posts cynically, or as a bit of savvy publicity, but in person, it’s clear that Larson cherishes her co-star. “If you could bottle up what’s inside of Jacob,” she tells me later in the evening, “if you could sell it — you’d be a billionaire. That sort of excitement, and innocence, and ease.”
Talking with Tremblay is the most animated Larson will be all night. She’s there to introduce a screening of Room for what a publicist describes to me as “media influencers and Academy members.” It’s a totally normal moviegoing experience, if going to the movies involves wearing heels and selecting from two different bottles of expensive water. But Larson’s there to make the attendees feel like the screening — and, by extension, the film — are special.
Photo by Caitlin Cronenberg, courtesy of A24
Larson is blonde and beautiful, with a high-wattage smile built for stardom. After her dressed-down performances in both Room and Short Term 12, the comparisons to Jennifer Lawrence — who first made an impression with a similarly unglamorous role in Winter’s Bone — come naturally. And if Lawrence is a Cool Girl, then Larson’s her low-key alternative: She doesn’t talk about farts or pizza, and although she’s incredibly warm — she gave me three hugs — she lacks Lawrence’s potent combination of clumsiness, sheepishness, and ballsiness. If anything, she’s a serious nerd, with the endlessly tunneling knowledge of a homeschooler, which she was. She loves lurking in obscure subreddits, leaning fully into her weirdness on the Nerdist Podcast, and making top 10 lists of her favorite Criterion films. (On Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage: “This was the most invested in any relationship I had ever been — including my own.”)
When people first started calling Larson an “It girl” after her performance in Short Term 12, she balked. She’s not new to the acting world— after she introduced the film, she dutifully posed for photos the way young starlets have been trained to pose: legs crossed at the ankle, one hand on hip — but the celebrity game, and the prescribed paths that accompany it, is anathema to her. Like other female actors who survived the child celebrity complex (Natalie Portman, Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart), she’s developed an attitude toward Hollywood that’s not cynical so much as deeply knowing. Larson’s staring over the precipice at stardom — and she has the distinctive demeanor of someone just getting out of a yoga class, even as she endures dozens of identical interviews that wonder, “Have you read the book?”
“I’m not a small-talker,” she says. “And there’s such a deeper question to this movie, and there’s so many interesting things you can talk about. So I’m always like, let’s get to what’s actually going on.”
Larson is photographed in Los Angeles on Sept. 29, 2015.
Joyce Lee for BuzzFeed News
Like Tremblay, Larson’s been in the business since she was a child, when she told her mother that acting was her "dharma.” At age 9, she started appearing in sketches on The Tonight Show; she dropped her French last name (Desaulniers) and adopted the one of her favorite American Girl doll (Larson). Then it was into the Disney trenches (the speed skating made-for-TV movie Right on Track) and a stint as Bob Saget’s daughter in a sitcom that no one can remember. She was a Six Chick in 13 Going on 30 and a mini-environmentalist in Hoot, and she released an album, Finally Out of P.E. Her singing career was shaped to fit the Miley/Selena/Britney actress/singer/sexybaby mold, but her album was delayed several times before the label dumped it, unceremoniously, in 2005. She sings with a disaffected, alt voice; the video for “She Said” has Larson in the tiniest of waitress uniforms, oiled-up legs, and dirty, chunky hair, doing her best knockoff Avril Lavigne.
Today, Larson thinks that girl is almost unrecognizable. We enter a private lounge decked out in candles and heavy curtains, and she selects a velvet couch and settles in. “I was so insecure and so hard on myself back then,” she explains. “But there was a moment when I started doing the math. It took me two hours to get ready every day — hair and makeup, so many clothes, trying to make sure everything matched really well — and I had this intense epiphany. I realized how much time I was spending getting ready for life — I wasn’t actually living it. It was the most terrified I’ve ever been in my life. So I went in the exact opposite way.”
She took a small role as a manic pixie dream ex-girlfriend in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. She’s still singing, and pouting, and wearing a short skirt, but it was enough to establish her as something of a nerd fetish object, as opposed to a piece of Disney bubblegum. It might not have been the “opposite” way, but it was another way — at least until her breakthrough, at age 20, as Toni Collette’s punkish daughter in the Showtime series United States of Tara. Collette won all the praise for her portrayal of a mother with dissociative identity disorder attempting to keep her “alters” at bay, but Larson — in a uniform of plaid pants, dog chains, and combat boots — gives a performance that places her alongside My So-Called Life's Angela in the pantheon of fully realized onscreen teenagers.
Tara helped earn her a slew of supporting roles in mainstream projects, playing younger than her early twenties self — as an angry high schooler in Rampart, a hot high schooler in 21 Jump Street, a hot and smart high schooler in The Spectacular Now, and a silent high schooler in Don Jon. In 2012, Larson made a short film with her two best friends called The Arm — a clever puzzle piece of a film, with the quick montages and overlapping dialogue of French New Wave and New American Cinema.
Larson and Keir Gilchrist in the second season of United States of Tara.
Showtime Networks Inc. / Everett Collection
Those are the sort of films that shaped Larson’s tastes as a teen — not the tween-directed Disney fare she was starring in. She discovered the Criterion Collection on Netflix and became obsessive. “No one ever liked the movies that I liked,” she told me. “I’d want to hog the one TV in our house to watch [Jean-Luc Godard’s] Masculin Féminin, and one time my mom just snapped at me: ‘I don’t want to read subtitles all day. I’ve worked all day, and I want to watch Top Chef, and I don’t want you to judge me for it.’ It was such a brutally honest moment for me, realizing I’m different from the rest of my family. I also realized that you can’t impose your taste on somebody. No matter how much you know something is beautiful, they’ll only be ready for it when they’re ready for it. I could never force my family to understand.”
Up to that point, she also couldn’t force directors to cast her in adult roles. It took a micro-budget production called Short Term 12 to give Larson her first leading role — a caregiver at a short-term foster center, grappling with the ghosts of her own difficult childhood — that felt at once deeply lived-in and new. The crew was minuscule; the rollout was tiny. But Larson’s performance is a punch to the stomach.
Short Term 12 coupled Larson’s performance with descriptions like “emotionally naked,” “impeccable,” and “luminous” and put her name on various Hollywood casting lists — and she quickly found herself turning down roles. “A big producer offered me the part of the pretty girl that waits at home for the guy, and I couldn’t do it,” she told Vulture. “That’s not a story I ever want to tell.”
And it’s certainly not the story of Room. Larson plays the part of Ma, an abductee, going on her seventh year in a room the size of most of our bedrooms. It’s a role that would require complex layers of performance: one for her 5-year-old son, Jack, for whom she’s created a safe and expansive world; another for her captor, who controls her supply of food, clothes, and heat; yet another for her parents once she’s escaped (not a spoiler; it’s in the trailer); and still another for the media, who want to interrogate her decisions.
For Ma, Room’s director, Irish indie darling Lenny Abrahamson, and Emma Donoghue (the author of the book and screenplay) were looking for something very particular: “Whoever plays Ma is going to have to win over this little boy who plays her son. I did not want a removed, 'whisking off to the trailer with two assistants after every take' sort of actress, because that’s not going to make sense to a kid.”
To prepare, Larson kept a diary to write her way through the emotions of her character; she went on a super-restrictive diet and stayed almost entirely indoors to approximate the look of someone wholly removed from the outside world. She worked with the film’s costume designer to create a very precise (and sparse) wardrobe: “We had to get into the mind of [her abductor] Old Nick, which was really creepy,” Larson says. “We had to think of what I would want, but also what was the cheapest thing he could get — so Walmart, or a thrift store. And then there’s the things she would’ve gone through her pregnancy wearing — that’s why so many of the clothes are stretched out in weird ways, like the cords, which I stretched to pregnancy size and then resewed to make them smaller so they’d fit on my body.”
Photo by Caitlin Cronenberg, courtesy of A24
She thought of what Ma would’ve been wearing at the time of her kidnapping — and then what Old Nick would’ve pawned from that outfit, and what he would’ve let her keep, and what he would’ve added. “There’s a necklace that was broken, and that she fixed with a safety pin,” she explains. “And a ring. And a horrible plastic watch. Basically I had them buy things that she would’ve had, and then I took them away from myself.”
It’s that sort of attention to detail that makes Larson’s performance, and the film it shapes, so wrenching. Like full on ugly-cry, nine different times. And then there’s the way she is with Tremblay. Sometimes she plays with him with deep joy; at other times, she’s mired in her own deep and unspeakable sadness. It’s all the feelings of parenting — the claustrophobia, the glee, the frustration — condensed into a tiny, combustive package.
Larson’s performance should all but ensure a nomination, and for good measure, it includes a classic Oscar campaign trope: body transformation. Larson’s diet was the sort that many stars endure — not for a role, but just for, well, life as a celebrity — but Larson has no interest in that sort of self-denial. “When I hit 13% body fat, the nutritionist was like, 'This is unhealthy for your body. It’s fine to do for these two months that you make the movie, but I don’t want you to become addicted.’ To what, my meals being timed down to the minute, and no carbs, and protein shakes for dinner? I can’t wait to be done.’ It was all just a way to get closer to her. Here's the thing: The part of me that I’m the most interested in — it’s my brain. So there’s nothing that I’m interested in doing to myself that's going to make my brain work less than where it is now.”
At this point, a publicist enters the room, hands Larson a menu, and asks for her dinner order. She fawns over the menu, asks what “broccoflower" is, dismisses the daily special of steak. “My favorite thing in the world is vegetable sides,” she murmurs, before asking for three of them.
Tremblay, Larson, and Joan Allen at the Room premiere.
Joe Scarnici / Getty Images
Tremblay walks in, shielded by his mom. It’s past his bedtime, so he only has time for a quick wave — “Hey bro!” Larson yells after him — before he’s led to a secluded corner to play Game Boy and fall asleep. Earlier, I’d asked him what the weirdest thing about Larson is, and he paused, then looked up in the air as a small smile crept over his face. “She likes Star Wars, and that’s a boy thing!”
I repeat this comment to Larson, and she laughs. “That’s how we became friends! He had the figurines and I was asking about them and able to talk about them, and he was like, ‘No way, you’re not into that.’ And then I knew Ninja Turtles as well, and he was so confused. Of course I know Ninja Turtles; I was born into the Ninja Turtles.”
Joyce Lee for BuzzFeed News
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