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“I’d like to see more women getting their hands dirty and expressing themselves about what it is to be a woman,” everyone’s current girl crush, Brie Larson tells GRAZIA, fresh from doing the promo rounds for her – quite literally – gargantuan upcoming blockbuster, Kong: Skull Island. “I don’t see it as much as I’d like to in movies. It seems like female characters either have to be the toughest one in the room or super-soft, and it’s so much more complicated than that.” Brie would know. At 27, the California-born actress, singer, director, and equal rights advocate is not only a woman of many facets, but has also built an Oscar/BAFTA/Golden Globewinning career on playing characters as diverse as bonkers rock chick Envy in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, to Amy Schumer’s wholesome sister in Trainwreck.
All, of course, via her career-defining performance as Ma in last year’s Room – the Fritzl-inspired story of a woman kidnapped, held in a shed for seven years, and repeatedly assaulted by her abductor, resulting in giving birth to a son who knows nothing of the outside world. Getting her hands dirty, then, seems par for the course for Brie, who immersed herself in the role beforehand by not leaving her LA apartment for a month.
“Preparing for a film is like preparing yourself to go on a journey,” she tells us. Kong – a huge, CGI-stamped, monster of a movie, filmed everywhere from Australia to Vietnam and Hawaii – was no doubt a journey too; just on an ever-so-slightly inflated scale.
“For a while I tried to be super ‘method’ about it,” she tells us of her role as photojournalist Mason Weaver, sent to Skull Island – with Tom Hiddleston, not a bad gig to be fair – to report on the capture of Kong, a 100-foot beast who is the very definition of large and in charge.
“I took a lot of photos on set and tried to really see the world through Weaver’s eyes,” she explains. “With any part, I do small things to get myself to see what the character sees, and once you start looking at the world through a lens – and I think this is such a beautiful metaphor – you start seeing people differently. When we see [Mason] in the film, she’s starting to recognise that a photo can only take you so far, and that capturing something terrible on film is not the same as doing something about it.”
It’s the perfect way to explain why, post-Room, Brie’s volunteering for female assault victims has stepped up a gear. Surely it’s impossible to take on such a harrowing role and leave it at the door when filming finally wraps? There’s speculation that this was why she refused to clap for Casey Affleck when awarding him with Best Actor for Manchester by the Sea at last month’s Oscars. Dogged by allegations of female harassment for years, he recently settled out of court, throwing up conversations around Hollywood’s reputation for turning a blind eye to the misgivings of powerful men.
“I wanted to give a strong voice to this character,” Brie tells us, rather fittingly. “She’s a working woman in a man’s world with a hard-earned reputation for being fearless and willing to do whatever it takes to expose the truth.” Life imitating art – or perhaps the other way around. So what exactly is the ‘truth’ about Kong? “He’s a force of nature – he is nature,” she explains. “We try to dominate it, but it always wins. Weaver comes at it from a different angle; she realises she has a chance to make a difference. That’s what I’m drawn to in every film I’ve done – a character who’s searching for something bigger than herself.
Not just the notion of wanting something for selfish reasons, but the recognition that we learn so much from each other. That’s the beauty of this story. It’s about people with opposing beliefs about who we are, and it’s critical that they try to communicate. It feels very relevant to our world experience today.
This article first appeared in GRAZIA UAE. Olivia Phillips is Deputy Editor at Grazia Middle East and Grazia Arabia. Follow her at @favouritething
