Brie Larson Says She Didn’t Play Captain Marvel Because She Wanted To Be A Hero

Captain Marvel was a runaway hit for Marvel as millions flocked to the theater to see the hero make her debut on the silver screen. Brie Larson spoke about her decision to take the role at the TIFF press conference for Just Mercy alongside her other co-star. She made it clear that the decision to play Captain Marvel came down to the opportunity to grow in the role and mature over time.

Larson said, “I didn’t play Captain Marvel because I wanted to be a hero, I just wanted to be a person. This was a great platform for me to play a person.”

“In a world where we are very hard on people who grow and change, to play characters who evolve and to work alongside real human beings who grow and evolve, that is real strength,” she concluded.

One thing Marvel has done a great job of is making their heroes very relatable. The interplay between different characters in various movies is always a high point of each installment. For her credit, Larson fit alongside Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel’s first outing. Then, in Avengers: Endgame, she didn’t miss a beat along with the extended cast.

Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely had a bit of a pickle on their hands when deciding how to including Captain Marvel into the large-scale team-up before the script for the solo outing existed. Both writers were trying to establish a consistent tone around the character as she would have been active for 23 years at the time Endgame takes place. The duo, along with the rest of the creative team, navigated those waters carefully before handing the character over to Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

McFeely explained the challenges to Backstory Magazine, “Yeah, that was a… God, I can’t imagine too many people in Hollywood have had to deal with that particular issue.”

“I remember sitting next to Anna and Ryan as they called action on Brie’s first day as Captain Marvel, which is on Endgame, and for the few weeks before that, they’d been around watching Joe and Anthony work because this is a big step up for [Boden and Fleck] in terms of size of movie.”

Markus and McFeely had to work in concert with Boden and Fleck to round out Captain Marvel. She officially joins the Avengers in 2018 after the snap and stays on intermittently throughout the five-year time jump. There are other developments for her personally as evidenced by her costume change before the time heist.

“We sat with them and showed them the draft and said, ‘Here’s how she works in our movie, and here’s how she sounds. Do you think this version of her, which is a version we had to decide on for our movie, which is 20 years after the hypothetical movie you’re going to make — have we done anything that would force you to do anything you didn’t want to do previously?’” McFeely added.

The writers also employed the wiggle room between Captain Marvel’s first superhero adventure in ’95 and the present-day setting of Endgame. Any inconsistencies could be boiled down to the natural growth that occurred during the unseen 20-plus years in space between the two films.

“I mean, that 20 years is both a weird thing to prompt us and a bit of a cushion in that there’s no telling what happens between the end of Captain Marvel and her appearance in our world,” Markus chimed in. “So, any fluctuations in character or appearance can be chalked up to the 20 years. I don’t look like I looked 20 years ago. We had to come to some consensus.”

That consensus was a hit with audiences, and now they’re hungry for Captain Marvel 2. No doubt there will be even more growth in store for Carol Danvers.