Brie Larson Talks Captain Marvel And The Empowerment of Getting Back Up Again
Higher. Futher. Faster. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, fans dried their tears long enough to see a blinking pager with a familiar call sign, that of Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel. The beloved character had yet to make her onscreen debut but that all changes March 8 when Captain Marvel debuts in theaters!
The release date is no accident, March 8 is International Women’s Day and it’s the ideal date to reveal the strong, female character who’s ready to fight. At a recent press conference, Captain Marvel herself, Brie Larson, talked about making sure that the character was relatable and able to give in to her faults, “There’s a lot to love about her, which is why I was really excited to do this; in particular, the idea of playing a superhero, or a female superhero in particular because my interest is in female complexity; I was a little worried about playing somebody, a superhero that would be perfect—because I don’t feel like that’s realistic, or something aspirational at all.”
Both on screen and behind the scenes, Larson wanted the audience to know that like in life, things don’t always work out, “Even with my job, like you could just see this beautiful finished product where I look great, maybe…in your opinion. Ah, but you don’t know all the other takes that are on the cutting room floor where sometimes I physically landed on my face doing stunts and sometimes I just do a bad take. It’s just how it goes. So getting to play a character where the whole character arc and turn of this is watching her be this major risk taker, which means it’s not always going to work out the best. And those are the moments, the defining moments of her character, where she doesn’t lay down, she gets back up. I mean, that’s everything. That’s for everybody. There isn’t a person who can’t relate to that, I don’t think.”
Accompanying Carol on her journey is her best friend Maria Rambeau, played by Lashana Lynch. Carol and Maria use their Airforce training and friendship to get through the toughest of life’s problems. “It’s wonderful to be able to be an actor and just add these different experiences and skills to your repertoire. And it was nice to just have the military welcome me into their environment and feel really like, noticed,” said Lynch.
Representation was important for Lynch, “For the woman to be really uplifted through the MCU I think is such a special marrying of two types of worlds that really meshed well together. So I feel like I’m not only representing women, I’m representing black women. I’m representing single mothers and representing all women in the, in the military and that’s pretty damn special.”
After filming, Lynch had time to reflect on her role, “My forever appreciation for single mothers, who don’t get enough light shined on them ever. So to be able to have that opportunity to represent them and say like, I’d kind of like to universally thank you for your work, was really special, actually. And I went to my mum and other mums I know afterwards and was like, can I just say thanks for everything that you’ve done for the last—however many years—and it really goes a long way just to say thank you daily.”
Carol learns that getting up when you’re down is the only way to survive. Larson learned that firsthand in her training for the film, “It’s very emotional when you’re kind of stirring up something very vulnerable and raw inside of you and you’re also learning that it’s just for you; there was nothing for me to prove. I wasn’t proving it to other people at the gym. I certainly wasn’t proving it to my trainer, because he was never going to be fully impressed; it’s his job to not be impressed. It was for myself. And for me, the main reason for doing it was so that in moments like this when we’re talking about Carol’s strength and we’re talking about, you know, what I learned from her, it’s that I’m stronger than I realized.”
“I can stand here and say that I am really strong; I was able to dead-lift 225 pounds; I was able to hip-thrust 400 pounds. I was able to push my trainer’s 5000-pound Jeep up a hill for 60 seconds.” Larson continued, “Um, so this concept, when it comes to like gender norms or what the human body is capable of or in particular maybe what a female body is capable of, it’s capable of a lot, you know.”
Captain Marvel soars into theaters on March 8!
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