Brie Larson’s magical tour to Australia, an Academy Award and Kong: Skull Island
FROM rolling around in mud and fake blood in Australia to slaying the Hollywood red carpet in glam gowns, Brie Larson enjoyed a surreal journey to winning an Oscar.
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AS if bringing King Kong back to life in a six-month shoot that spanned Vietnam, Hawaii and the Gold Coast wasn’t adventurous enough, Brie Larson spent the January-February 2016 leg of production on Kong: Skull Island flying back and forth between Australia and Los Angeles.
When you’re the favourite to win Best Actress at the Academy Awards — as Larson wound up doing — you’re not going to miss awards season even for the greatest of great apes.
Factor the head-spin of winning an Oscar in with the jet lag, and it’s a wonder Larson remembers making Kong: Skull Island at all.
“It was a surreal back and forth,” acknowledges the 27-year-old Californian. “During the week it would be putting on cuts and bruises and fake dirt under my fingernails and I was climbing and rolling around on the ground. Then on weekends I would fly back to LA where they would try and clean all the dirt out from underneath my fingernails and take the fake blood off of my shoulder and put me back together again.”
KING: SKULL ISLAND IS A MONSTER HIT — Vicky Roach’s review
It wasn’t just the Oscar that Larson took home last year for playing a captive mother in Room, she nabbed the lot: BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG.
Yet with her Kong: Skull Island co-star Tom Hiddleston on the case, there was little chance of her head inflating.
In collusion with cast and crew, the Englishman led a ‘Brie boycott’ when she returned to set an Oscar winner.
“It was in the make-up trailer where we were having our helicopter crash wounds applied — we all pretended not to notice her,” Hiddleston recalls. “After five minutes, the head make-up artist burst the party poppers, revealed a whole cupboard full of balloons and I played Celebration by Kool & the Gang very, very loudly. So it was a boycott that lasted about five minutes.
“We were so excited for her,” he adds. “We were in these jungles and swamps day in, day out for six months and for the second half of the shoot, every other weekend she would fly back to LA and pick up another major award. It was an extraordinary thing to go through; just to go through one of those experiences is life-changing, but to go through both at the same time was amazing to witness.”
Twelve months on from winning the Oscar, all Larson can really think now is that “it seems like it’s gone by really fast”.
At the time of speaking to Hit, she had already been to several of the 2017 awards shows and was enjoying having the experience without the expectations. For starters, she could get as drunk as she liked: “I don’t have to worry about talking!”
But mostly, she says, it’s nice to just be able to “clap and toast and celebrate others” — a feeling she summed up in an Instagram post after last week’s Academy Awards.
Back in the jungle for Kong: Skull Island, Larson was just one of the guys.
Set at the very end of the Vietnam War, the movie — which nails its fun melding of creature feature, ’70s war flick tropes and action-adventure — sees a US army squadron (led by Samuel L. Jackson) escort a motley bunch of US scientists and cartographers to the previously uncharted Skull Island.
Hiddleston is former SAS captain James Conrad, hired by John Goodman’s boss man to lead them safely through the jungle.
And Larson is the “anti-war” photojournalist who hitches a ride, lured by the idea of photographing something humankind has never clapped eyes on.
Naturally, there’s a lot more to this mysterious island than the hapless humans realise and the minute their helicopter transport hits clear air, they’re in trouble.
Had it been the kind of trouble where Larson wears a pretty dress and screams to be saved from Kong’s clutches, she wouldn’t have signed on
“It seems like you know me really well!” Larson says with a laugh. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being that type. It’s just when you are doing a new take on this type of classic, you don’t even wanna touch what happened with the original, you wanna bring it somewhere new.
“And I think we’re hitting the point where we’re really excited, across the board — not just women, but men as well — to see a different type of hero.”
What stands out about Larson’s snapper Mason Weaver in Kong: Skull Island is that while all the blokes are carrying guns, the camera is Weaver’s only weapon.
“I thought that was a really important touch with this film, that I never try and threaten anyone with violence of any kind,” says Larson. “The camera is a way of sharing the truth — it’s holding a mirror up and that’s far more powerful than trying to intimidate.”
Hit suggests that’s an especially apt concept in today’s political climate.
“Yes,” she agrees. “There’s a lot of big questions being asked of us right now and it’s a great time for us to sit with ourselves and figure out what the answer is.”
Larson has been acting since childhood — her very first paid gig involved playing with toys for a Tonight Show with Jay Leno sketch when she was eight-years-old. She also toyed with being a pop star as a teenager, but acting took the lead when she kicked off her 20s playing Toni Collette’s daughter in the TV series United States of Tara.
(Music is still a big part of Larson’s life, not least in the shape of her fiance Alex Greenwald. Formerly of the band Phantom Planet, Greenwald is now in a group called Phases.)
Her path towards the A-list and the Oscar began in earnest with the 2013 indie film Short Term 12, in which she played a young supervisor at a foster care facility struggling to cope.
Since then she’s played Amy Schumer’s sister in the comedy Trainwreck and signed up for superhero duty as Captain Marvel — who will, after making her debut in next year’s Avengers: Infinity War, become the first female superhero to headline her own movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Call me Captain Marvel. pic.twitter.com/IgqRIb9ijM
— Brie Larson (@brielarson) July 24, 2016
With that looming job in mind, and card-carrying MCU members Hiddleston and Jackson alongside her, all the action on offer in Kong: Skull Island proved to be great training.
“I got to learn from the best,” Larson says. “I had never done a film like this before and they (Hiddleston and Jackson) obviously had done a few, so they were able to show me the ropes and help me better understand how to do it.
“It’s a different animal, it’s kind of like learning how to do theatre or something. It’s completely different in the way you perform and use your body and imagine.”
Larson, who was hugely into mythology as a kid, also loved the allegorical aspect of the Kong story. The other factor she hadn’t really considered until she was on set was being part of a team — one banded together a long way from home.
“I haven’t done a ton of ensemble pieces and I haven’t worked with a lot of actors my own age, so it was a really fun experience,” Larson says. “Especially on weekends when we would go play laser tag or go go-karting, having people the same age as you to go pal around with.”
She was, she confirms, “the den mother” in charge of organising activities: “You’re in a new country, it’s only fair you go explore it.”
While in Queensland, she had everyone attend the Outback Spectacular, visit a wildlife sanctuary where they “held baby koalas”, take some of those “old-timey photos” and hit the rides at Movie World.
“Movie World was kind enough to close down for us, so we got the whole park to ourselves one night which was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” she says.
Her leadership must have impressed a certain Mr Jackson, who has since acted in Larson’s first feature film as director, Unicorn Store.
Larson wrapped the indie comedy shortly before Christmas.
So, what’s scarier: facing off against a crazed Samuel L. Jackson on screen, or standing behind the camera giving him orders?
“I’m not a big order-giver,” Larson laughs. “I’m more of a collaborator. He has a really good sense of humour and that’s how I like to communicate and diffuse situations, so we got on just fine. I adore him. He’s my pal.”
A LITTLE BRIE MORE
If you catch wind of an old-school zing in the repartee between Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island, well, good — that’s exactly what they were going for.
“We conceived it that way,” explains Hiddleston. “These two characters, Conrad the former SAS tracker and Weaver the anti-war photojournalist, they’re both iconoclasts, they’re sceptical about the status quo, they want to get behind the curtain and find out the truth. So in a way they’re both loners and they’re bonded by that.”
“It feels very old Hollywood, doesn’t it,” agrees Larson, “the back and forth, that type of banter that we don’t see in a lot of contemporary films. I love that stuff.”
What you won’t get between the pair, warns Hiddleston, is romance.
“Because they respect each other,” he says. “But there’s still a great chemistry in their camaraderie as outsiders, which I think is really fresh.”
KING: SKULL ISLAND OPENS TODAY
Originally published as Brie Larson’s magical tour to Australia, an Academy Award and Kong: Skull Island
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