Let It Brie

Taking on the role of the ultimate feminist hero, Captain Marvel, was no small feat, but BRIE LARSON, defender of people both onscreen and off, is not just any actress.

- Sana Amanat

It was a tad surreal waiting for Brie Larson at a dimly lit, rustic Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills. I’m a Marvel comic-book editor, as well as the co-creator of Kamala Khan, a Muslim-American hero whose idol happens to be Captain Marvel, the very role that Larson, 29, is playing in movie theaters around the world this month. Meeting the star of Marvel’s first female-led superhero film felt, well, a touch meta.

As far as hero origin stories go, Larson’s began quite early. She says her first “Aha!” acting moment came when she played the Energizer Bunny at the age of 4 during her family’s Christmas talent show. “At one point I had to walk across the living room in the costume, and my whole family laughed,” Larson says, smiling. “I didn’t know that was something that could happen, and I didn’t understand why it happened, but I liked it.”

As a young girl, she would pull at her mother’s shirttails in her childhood home in Sacramento, Calif., to tell her it was her “dharma” to be an actress. “It was a way of learning how to be a person,” recalls Larson, dressed in a black sweatshirt, a jeweled choker, and jeans as she sips a Campari cocktail. “This is how you make eye contact. This is how you talk. This is how you hold a conversation. This is how you connect with your feelings. This is how you express yourself. I’d be in a completely different place if I hadn’t found acting so early on, because I think I really would have found comfort in my extreme shyness.”

At the age of 6, Larson enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco to study drama. She was the youngest student ever to be admitted.