Brie Larson is sitting in a hotel lobby, 9,000 feet above sea level. “I can’t tell if what’s happened these past couple of days is real of not,” she says. Like many at the Telluride film festival, Larson is suffering altitude sickness. Unlike most festival-goers, however, she has also had a career-changing weekend.
The actor – who, like Shailene Woodley, her co-star in The Spectacular Now, kicks off interviews with a hug – has won rave reviews for her raw leading turn in Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s bestseller Room. Pundits now have her pegged as a likely awards contender, with Deadline’s award columnist advising the distributor to “get its Oscar campaign rolling” for Larson.
In Room, she plays a young woman abducted and raped seven years ago, and now imprisoned in a backyard shack with her five-year-old son, who has never known a normal life. Given the challenging nature of the material, plus the fact that she’s not a mother, Larson’s trepidation about the project is understandable.
“This was the first time I felt a tiny bit of expectation,” she says. Previously, she thinks the industry knew her as a “dark horse … the person you didn’t know”. There were roles as Channing Tatum’s love interest in 21 Jump Street and Toni Collette’s rebellious daughter in the Showtime series United States of Tara. But it was 2013’s Short Term 12, a little-seen but much-loved drama set in a mental health facility that proved her breakthrough. And her guiding star, it turns out.
“What Short Term 12 did was it gave me the confidence to explore my intuition more,” she says. “The healing process that came for me for making that movie and then sharing it with people - I was able to see, first hand, that movies can have a healing power and they can teach us things. After that it was like I had a bug – this is the type of film that I want to make. In a way, it allowed me to know I can go deep.”
Larson’s role in Short Term 12 shares with Room a propensity to sudden spurts of violence. She’s an inherently likeable person yet the parts she picks have been notable for their flaws. Home-schooled in Los Angeles, she watched a lot of European cinema; something she feels informed her feelings about acting.
“The women [in European cinema] are much more volatile and much more complicated – at times you don’t really like them,” she says. “I really connected to that. I didn’t want to just watch a woman who was getting it right all the time. We’re not perfect.
“I’m 25, I’m a white, blonde girl in the entertainment industry – it’s so easy to fall into a world of pleasing everyone. I feel more comfortable showing all these odd angles to myself.”
Larson’s less complex role as Amy Schumer’s sister in Trainwreck won her a host of new fans; today she looks more akin to that – healthy and relaxed, in jeans and leather jacket – than the starved, sunlight-deprived woman of Room. The shoot required Larson to work with a trainer and stick to a sparse diet. “It was all about just me enough to survive,” she says. “I had to do blood work every week to make sure I was OK.”
Just the kind of thing Oscar likes, of course. So what would a nomination mean to her at this point? Larson is diplomatic. “Any sort of accolade that can come from this is sort of a by-product.”
She leans forward. “But God, I’m 25 - I’ve got a while.”
