Larson climbs ‘Glass Castle’
Actor plays journalist with rough childhood
The future Captain Marvel has an adorable secret. When the going gets tough, “I play a lot of video games. Right now, all I’m thinking about are my crops I need to harvest in my Smurfs village,” Brie Larson laughs.
Smurfs’ Village and The Magical Meadow is a friendly antidote to an incredible Hollywood trajectory. In 2016, Larson won the best-actress Oscar for her performance in Room. Since then, she has starred in the big-budget Kong: Skull Island, been anointed by Marvel for her own stand-alone superhero movie and directed her first film, Unicorn Store (now in post-production).
She stars in The Glass Castle (in theaters Friday), based on the best-selling memoir by Jeannette Walls about being raised by an alcoholic father (Woody Harrelson) and artist mother (Naomi Watts) in selfimposed poverty.
It’s a raw, probing story that Walls, a New York journalist, had long been hesitant to reveal. The Walls lived a vagabond life during Jeanette’s childhood, squatting in abandoned homes often without power or water. When Walls was 17, she moved to New York.
“Brie blew me away,” says Walls of watching Larson, 27, portray her younger self, “somebody who cares deeply but is trying desperately not to. And she just nailed that with the eyes and the confusion and the hurt and the steeliness.”
Walls lives on a rural Virginia farm now and has built a house on her property for her mother. But to this day, “when I’m at a fancy hotel (like) the Ritz and I’ll see somebody has left a tray of food outside the room, I have an almost physical impulse: ‘Oh, that’s good food!’ ” she says. “I have to remind myself: You can buy the food you want. You don’t have to eat other people’s leftovers.”
Next, Larson will transition to the biggest role of her career as Captain Marvel, a feminist superhero known as one of the most powerful figures in the Marvel Universe.
“It’s crazy to see your friend become a superhero,” says Glass Castle director Destin Daniel Cretton, who first directed Larson in 2013’s Short Term 12, the indie film that catapulted her to projects like Room. “Brie has changed in so many ways, but the core of who she is hasn’t changed at all.”
Sitting in a breezy hotel suite, she’s careful about revealing even small details about her new gig. Try just asking Larson if she has been in serious training. “I can’t say!” she laughs. She’s equally hush-hush about the possibility her character will pop up in Avengers: Infinity War.
One thing Larson will reveal is her reaction to seeing Wonder Woman on the big screen. “I sobbed, like, seven times,” she says. “It just felt really important. It felt like something I hadn’t seen.”
Before her Marvel-size spotlight hits, Larson reflects on what it’s like to have found her “person”: fiancé Alex Greenwald, a musician: “I don’t think I could do any of this without my person.”