The Californian actress opts for the best actress statuette for her role in 'The Room', the story of a kidnapped woman who raises her son during her captivity
After winning the Golden Globe and the Actors Guild Award for Best Actress, Brie Larson (California, 1989) is now up for an Oscar for her memorable portrayal of a kidnapping victim in 'The Room'. Her name is on everyone's lips as if she were the newest discovery in Hollywood. However, she has been acting since she was a child. 'Infiltrated in Class', 'Scenes of a Crime', 'And suddenly you' or 'The Lives of Grace' are some of the titles that are part of her extensive curriculum. In addition to directing and writing short films, the versatile actress has embarked on a successful musical career for a decade.
As if that were not enough, she leaves everyone impressed every time she steps on a red carpet. When she appears, everything lights up. "Yes, after a very intense year I needed a bit of glamor and fun," she says, referring to the time she was subjected to the psychological torture of that claustrophobic study on freedom that is 'The Room'. In it, he plays Ma, a young woman kidnapped by a psychopath, who leaves her pregnant, and after giving birth in captivity, she spends five years raising and educating her son, making him believe that living locked in a room is perfectly normal.
What do all these awards and the recognition you are receiving for your work on 'La habitación' mean to you? For me it means that I have been able to connect with others, something I never thought I was capable of doing. I was always afraid of not being liked or not being a normal person. At school, she was not the prettiest in the class nor was she the ugliest, so she went completely unnoticed. As if it didn't exist. It seemed to me that everyone knew how to do something except me and that nobody questioned anything while I was in a sea of confusion. Until I started using all those fears and doubts in my work. Suddenly I saw people respond saying they were just as confused as I was. 'The room' has been the best example of this.
Would you dare to say that Ma is the role of your life? I don't think there are many roles like Ma's. We haven't reached that point yet where we are saturated with female characters who are strong and complicated. They produce one or two a year and this has been one of them. I'm just trying to get on that train.
Not only has he boarded but he is in first class. What has it meant to have a director like Lenny Abrahamson driving that train? Lenny is very human, so I felt in very good hands. He allowed me to transcend such a terrifying story and turn those horrible events into something positive, to think of it as a story about the power of love and freedom so as not to focus on torture and captivity.
How did he prepare himself to put himself in the shoes of a kidnapped person? I went on silent retreats to help me understand what those two years of complete solitude, before the birth of the child, would have been like for my character. I was in complete silence for a month in my house. When you remove all stimuli, it's like the brain is saying: finally we have some space.
And what else was his brain telling him? I remembered my childhood when I was seven years old and my mother filled our old Mercedes with our things. We went to Los Angeles because I wanted to be an actress. We moved to a studio. We had a bed that came out of the wall, we lived on noodles, and I only had a couple of Mcdonald's toys. I thought we were living the dream! However, I remember that sometimes my mother's sobs woke me up. Years later I realized that we moved there because she had such a hard time with the divorce.
The director says that you helped a lot when it came to directing little Jacob Tremblay, who plays his son. Do you aspire to direct a feature film in the future? Yes, not only directing but also writing scripts. Three years ago I wrote and directed a short, which premiered at Sundance and won an award for best comedy script. Later, I made another one that was also at various festivals. For now I,'m going to concentrate on acting, but I'm still writing. I hope to be able to direct my first feature in a couple of years.
Since 'The Room' premiered, he has not stopped making public appearances. How do you deal with all that pressure? Good because the film has been well-liked well-liked everywhere it has been released, so I don't feel any pressure. Even though my perspective on things is different now, I'm still the same person. I may have won awards, I may win an Oscar, but when I come home I have to take the trash out on the street and feed my dogs and clean up after them. Everything will continue the same and that is the most important thing. I don't feel nervous or pressured by anything.
Not even when it comes to being the most elegant on the red carpet? For me, elegance in dressing is expressing with the clothes you are wearing what is happening inside of you. My goal is to reflect what my soul is like, which is much more complicated than any dress that exists in the world.
