Brie Larson, the Oscar winner who paused her career rather than play Room again

Brie Larson

Photo: 2d Lt Jessica Cicchetto / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 1, 1989 Sacramento, California
Occupation	Actress, Producer, Director
Known for	Avengers: Endgame, Room, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Awards	Academy Award · BAFTA · Golden Globe · SAG Award · Emmy · Locarno Film Festival Best Actress

When the pandemic shut down the sets, Brie Larson did something few actors with an Oscar on the shelf can afford: she stopped. The scripts arriving at her door, she explained later, were all variations of the same woman she had already played, the mother who raises her son inside a locked shed. Instead of taking one more of them, she spent her time on podcasting and video diaries, and on a virtual-reality project that ended up winning her an Emmy. Then this year she was back in a billion-dollar hit as a princess kidnapped and held captive, and critics complained that Rosalina in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie did little more than strain against her bonds.

That is the joke her career keeps telling at her expense, and also the clue to how she has learned to answer it. Hollywood sees in Larson the person who endures under pressure. She has stopped arguing with that and started owning it. The prestige series she carried on Apple TV+ was a project she developed and executive produced. The FX limited series she has just filmed opposite Olivia Colman puts her back inside a family in crisis, and her name is on it as a producer. The question is no longer whether she will be typecast, but who gets to hold the pen when she is.

She was born Brianne Sidonie Desaulniers on October 1, 1989, in Sacramento, California, the elder daughter of Heather and Sylvain Desaulniers, homeopathic chiropractors who ran a practice together. Her father is Franco-Manitoban, and French was her first language; she holds both American and Canadian citizenship. Mostly home-schooled, shy and, by her own account, “strait-laced and square”, she made home movies in the family garage with her cousins as the cast. At six she auditioned for a training program at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and became the youngest student it had ever admitted.

Her parents divorced when she was seven, and her mother took both girls, Brie and her younger sister Milaine, to Los Angeles so the older one could try to work. Money was tight. “We had a crappy one-room apartment where the bed came out of the wall and we each had three articles of clothing,” she has said of those years near the studio lots in Burbank, which she still remembers fondly. Desaulniers was hard for casting directors to pronounce, so she borrowed Larson from a Swedish great-grandmother and from Kirsten Larson, the American Girl doll she had been given as a child. Her first job was a parody commercial, “Malibu Mudslide Barbie”, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1998.

The teenage years were a long apprenticeship in rejection. She was a regular on the sitcom Raising Dad and was cast in a Fox comedy, Schimmel, that was cancelled before it aired. She also tried pop. Signed by Tommy Mottola to Casablanca Records, she released Finally Out of P.E. in 2005, named after a gym teacher she disliked; the single “She Said” reached MTV’s Total Request Live and she opened for Jesse McCartney, yet the album sold only 3,500 copies. “I wanted to write all my own songs, and they were afraid of that,” she said later. “I wanted to wear sneakers and play my guitar, they wanted heels and wind-blown hair.”

The parts that followed were mostly the sister, the girlfriend or the sardonic teenager, as in United States of Tara, but a few of them pointed somewhere. In Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World she played Envy Adams, a rock star, and sang “Black Sheep” with the band Metric; she has called it a turning point, and the film’s cult has outlived its box office. 21 Jump Street put her in front of the largest audience of her career at that point. More telling was what she did off camera: in 2012 she co-wrote and co-directed the short The Arm, which won a special jury prize at Sundance.

Short Term 12, Destin Daniel Cretton‘s 2013 drama about a group home for troubled teenagers, gave her the first lead of her career. Her Grace, a supervisor who can calm any crisis except her own, was built from time spent with staff at a real children’s home, on a film made for under a million dollars. Manohla Dargis called her “completely persuasive” in The New York Times; the Locarno Film Festival gave her its best actress prize. Directors started offering her a far wider range of parts, and she began turning down the one-dimensional love interests that had filled her résumé.

Then came Room. Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel cast her as Ma, a young woman held captive for years who raises the son she bore to her captor inside a garden shed. Much of the film was shot in a ten-by-ten-foot set; to prepare, Larson spent a month isolated in her apartment, stayed out of the sun, changed her diet and talked with specialists in sexual abuse. She said she modelled Ma on her own mother’s years as a single parent. With Jacob Tremblay as her son, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, along with the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the Screen Actors Guild award. Abrahamson later said her craft has “none of that showy intensity that sometimes gets all the attention”.

What followed was a scattering of bets. The shoot-out comedy Free Fire failed to earn back its budget; Kong: Skull Island, her first big studio production, grossed more than half a billion dollars while giving her, as reviewers noted, little to do. A second film with Cretton, The Glass Castle, drew a cool reception, and the long-shelved musical Basmati Blues drew criticism for its white-saviour story. In between she directed her first feature, Unicorn Store, a comedy about a disillusioned art student obsessed with unicorns that premiered in Toronto and later went to Netflix.

Marvel offered the opposite of a shed. Captain Marvel was the studio’s first film led by a woman, and Larson prepared with nine months of judo, boxing and wrestling and visits to Nellis Air Force Base. It became the first female-led superhero film to pass a billion dollars worldwide, and she had already shot her part in Avengers: Endgame, which briefly became the highest-grossing film ever made.

The cape also made her a target, and here the usual story is too tidy. One version casts Larson as the victim of online trolls; the other as an actress who brought the backlash on herself. The record holds both. At the 2018 Crystal + Lucy Awards she criticised the lack of diversity among film critics and announced a quota for under-represented journalists at Sundance and Toronto; in a 2019 interview she described the critics and journalists covering film as “overwhelmingly white male”, and the Captain Marvel page on Rotten Tomatoes was review-bombed. She was also among the first actors to write an inclusion rider into her contracts. The sequel, The Marvels, became a box-office bomb in 2023. Marvel has not announced her for Avengers: Doomsday, due on December 18, and when Entertainment Tonight asked where Carol Danvers would be, she answered: “Oh, you know that I can’t talk about that. Nice try.” By 2025 she had also become far less willing to talk about politics in public.

The pandemic pause was not idle. She produced and appeared in an episode of Van Jones’s The Messy Truth VR Experience, which won the Primetime Emmy for outstanding interactive program, and she created, directed and hosted the Disney+ documentary series Growing Up. When she returned to acting, it was with a small role as Tess in Fast X and with a project she had steered from the start: she hired the producer Lee Eisenberg to adapt Bonnie Garmus’s novel Lessons in Chemistry and spent two years on it as executive producer. As Elizabeth Zott, a 1960s chemist who turns a television cooking show into a science class, she earned nominations for the Primetime Emmy and the Golden Globe.

The stage came next. In January 2025 she opened in Sophocles’s Elektra, in Anne Carson’s translation and Daniel Fish’s staging, first at the Theatre Royal Brighton and then for eleven weeks at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre, with Stockard Channing in the cast. She shaved her head for the part and said she wanted to play to “audiences who are not on their phones”. The reviews were rough: the Evening Standard called the production an “impenetrable slog” while crediting her with “layers of bitterness, resentment and desperation”, and The New York Times found her intensity “one-note”. The same year she appeared in the fourth season of The Bear as Francie Fak, a character mentioned since the second season who finally showed up and fought with Sugar Berzatto, and she published a cookbook, Party People, with the chef Courtney McBroom.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, released on April 1, 2026, cast her as Rosalina, the guardian of the Lumas who turns out to be Princess Peach’s older sister. The film grossed $1.013 billion worldwide, the second-highest total for any video game adaptation, behind its predecessor. Reviewers were less kind about her share of it: Gizmodo wrote that Larson “barely even gets more than a handful of lines” beyond grunting against her captivity, though Mercedes Rose, the original voice of Rosalina in the game, praised her performance and said she deserved more screen time.

What comes next shows her choosing harder material again. Cry Wolf, created for FX by Sarah Treem from the Danish series Ulven kommer, stars Larson as April, a mother whose teenage daughter alleges abuse, and Olivia Colman as Kath, the social worker who takes the case; it was filmed in Toronto between February and May 2026 and has no premiere date yet. Sony has dated Skeletons, a creature horror film directed by JT Mollner from a script by Brian Duffield, for June 4, 2027. Paramount has set One Italian Summer, Harry Bradbeer’s adaptation of Rebecca Serle’s novel, for May 12, 2028, with Larson as Katy and as executive producer. She is also in the cast of the Amazon MGM comedy Close Personal Friends with Lily Collins, Jack Quaid and Henry Golding. A Netflix deal signed in 2019 for Lady Business, the true story of two founders who invented a male partner to be taken seriously, has produced no news since.

She remains guarded about her private life and declines questions that make her uncomfortable, saying that privacy lets her disappear into very different roles. She was engaged to Alex Greenwald of the band Phantom Planet from 2016 to 2019. She turned 37 this month, and the most telling detail of the slate ahead is a credit line rather than a part: on Cry Wolf and One Italian Summer, the woman under pressure is also one of the people producing it.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Olivia Colman, Brie Larson, Lessons in Chemistry, Room, Short Term 12

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