When Brie Larson talks about
Captain Marvel, the word that comes up over and over again is “flaw.”
Carol Danvers — the Air Force pilot with alien powers that Larson plays in
Captain Marvel — is very flawed. She may be a part-Kree, part-human warrior with the powers of a god, but she’s anything but godlike: She’s aggressive and brash, impulsive and hotheaded. She’s the first one to rush into battle, and she doesn’t always wait for orders. She tells bad jokes. And in many ways,
Captain Marvel (out March 2019) finds her at war with herself, as she tries to reconcile her Kree perfectionism with her human fallibility.
“You have this Kree part of her that’s unemotional, that is an amazing fighter and competitive,” Larson says. “Then there’s this human part of her that is flawed but is also the thing that she ends up leading by. It’s the thing that gets her in trouble, but it’s also the thing that makes her great. And those two sides warring against each other is what makes her her.”
Carol’s flaws are what drive her story, and it’s those same flaws that drew Larson — an Oscar winner best known for dramas like
Room and
Short Term 12 — to
Captain Marvel. There are the action scenes and wisecracks and bright-green aliens that come with most Marvel movies, of course, but there are also moments of introspection: When the film starts, Carol has left Earth behind to adventure in the stars and join the elite Kree military team Starforce, but she soon finds herself back on her home planet with new questions about her past and identity.
“That is something that is really exciting to me about this film: We did not cut corners on that stuff,” Larson says. “Like, when it’s funny, it is funny, but also when there’s deep emotional things happening, it’s real. So I was able to bring some of those same things that I’ve brought to full dramatic roles into this, which I’m really proud of because I think it will really set this film apart.”
I figured as much.
